There are exemptions which are pretty low and clearly don't cover the above examples. Plus you still have to do the overly onerous reporting of all your bank accounts. Ultimately the winners are the accountants.
It's not justified at all by services that the US does for overseas citizens, many countries do that without needing a draconian tax system for non-resident citizens.
I think it sort of comes down to Americans believing that you must be up to something dodgy if you want to live in another country :)
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/bor...
Not really. You get to offset foreign taxes and exempt more income than most US residents earn.
The filing requirements are sort of onerous, the taxation isn't.
I can see where it is sort of punitive to pay taxes on a large capital gain that has nothing to do with the US, but when you are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars of such income you are talking about outliers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Individ...
As a side note, the biggest difference seems to be how countries treat foreign income.
Almost every country that has Income Taxes will tax any local income.
But there's a lot of variance on what they do for foreign income.