Denmark is another country with a similar law, which causes a reasonable amount of angst among Danes reaching that age. Particularly true of those with US/Danish citizenship, because once you renounce one or the other, it closes off a lot of options: being a US citizen can be quite good for a lot of career paths, while being an EU citizen can open up a lot of options in a different direction.
edit: Looking into a bit, one thing making Denmark's law somewhat less draconian is that former Danes who lose their citizenship via this process at age 22 still have some kind of special lifetime Danish work/residency permission. So they could opt for the U.S. citizenship while retaining the option to return to Denmark. They would lose the right to live/work in other EU countries under the freedom-of-movement agreement, though, since they'd no longer have an EU passport.
So it seems the only way to not do this is renouncing citizenship.
Look at my daughter. She was born in Europe with three nationalities, including American. Say, for the sake of argument, she spends her entire life in Europe. She will nevertheless be expected to file a tax return with the IRS every year, to possibly pay US taxes, and to file an FBAR every year should she have more than US$10,000 in the bank.
(At the moment the requirement to pay US taxes generally only kicks in if your income exceeds certain thresholds, but given the lack of esteem Congress has for overseas US nationals I would not be surprised if the rules governing this became more onerous.)
These requirements are simply unconscionable for somebody who has never received and will never receive any services from the US government. And yet they will be imposed on her, unless she takes concrete action when she turns 18 to renounce her American citizenship - because she has US nationality, whether she likes it or not, along with the insane obligations that come with it.
Rant time: I despise what political discourse in this country has become. Rather than talk about policy we've trained everyone (like marshallp here) to regurgitate sound bites about how this or that politician is "gonna go all out" to do whatever evil thing sounds fun this week. Look: tax policy is a bunch of boring laws. You can read them if you like. You can look at proposed laws and make suggestions, and argue with the specifics of what our government is doing or what it proposes to do.
But slinging around loaded terms like "taxing entrepreneurs" or "lazy government workers" is hurting us all, and helping no one but the spin doctors. Stop it. Try to be smarter than that.
Edit: more spin terms from the reply: "out of our wallets", "my money". Spin if you want, but if you try to argue about policy using language you got from cable news, you'll merely perpetuate the current policy situation (designed almost exclusively to cater to the attention spans of cable news viewers).
Here's the snopes page on that very tax: http://www.snopes.com/politics/taxes/realestate.asp Amusingly, the spin it's trying to fight is that it's a tax on "home buyers". Apparently the "entrepreneurs" angle is a new one.
It's a tax. Is it a bad one? Dunno, I think on balance an increase in the capital gains rate (which is sort of what this is) gated on income level isn't a bad way to raise that revenue. You have a different suggestion?
Maybe not being associated with that (or at least not as much) is another of Sivers' reasons for renouncing...
Edit: removed the "zero tax" bit as apparently it sounds like spin. I don't think it changes the point. (was: ", even though no one sane thinks a zero tax policy is possible")
There are many kinds of spin, that's one of them.
So is that like a very mild dislike or something? Otherwise, that sentence makes zero sense.
So it's OK for people to pool capital into companies and abuse workers, but it's not OK for workers to pool labor into unions to prevent it?
In what country? In the US, most are mandated by law. All government jobs are union, regardless of the wishes of the worker.
Contracts are mutually consented to. If it's a union job, you have to be a part of the union. How is forcing workers to do something they do not want beneficial?
I'm all for unions where someone can join and leave freely without the threat of force or loss of work. Do we have that in the US? No.
As far as Union jobs go, it depends. There are Union jobs that require it and don't require it. However, this has nothing to do with the worker, but is actually a contractual obligation that the employer agreed to.
[1] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2011/01/federal...
The devil is in the details. I wonder what that figure would look like if you excluded part-time workers like, say, the census workers who are collecting the very data you cite?
> However, this has nothing to do with the worker, but is actually a contractual obligation that the employer agreed to.
Nope. The last time an employer "agreed" to a union was probably a century ago. Federal law mandates how the process is handled and the employer doesn't agree to anything. It is forced on him.
Which is fine.
What isn't fine is that it is forced on the workers too, even if they don't want it. And every worker after them.
Not cool.
Federal unions have complained that their low union membership totals is due to the federal government being the largest ‘right-to-work’ employer. Right-to-work allows an employee to determine whether he or she wants to join a union. It also keeps employers from making union membership an employment prerequisite.
Via: http://ohmygov.com/blogs/general_news/archive/2009/02/02/a-l...
See also:
However, the most important aspect to having a federal union membership is the collective bargaining agreement. This agreement is a contract between an employer and the union which terms of employment are negotiated and adhered to by the employer and the union. These terms can be about the hiring process, salary, working conditions employment termination, work hours or employee grievances. A union represents the employee to ensure that the employer does not violate the collective bargaining agreement.
There is a long list of things up for negotiation. It seems to me that very little is being forced on anyone.
and
Also, federal unions cannot compel a non-union member to become a union member; to pay union fees or make union membership an employment precondition. As a result, federal union membership numbers are relatively small in comparison to the overall size of the federal civilian workforce.
Again, no one is being forced into anything again. They can't even establish union only jobs.
via the same link.
Tax purposes, political protest, or what?
Also: it's funny that the government misspells the acronym of their own law, HIPAA.