Perhaps because no other country goes to the same lengths to help its citizens abroad in times of trouble. When there's geopolitical trouble brewing, it not uncommon for other nationalities to take advantage of American evacuations. Few countries come close the US in leveraging intelligence and logistics to help citizens; France is probably #2.

Let’s suppose I travel for business and am not a teenager working through power fantasies. What’s in it for me if my concerns are not childish?

You know the usa bills people for evacuating them right :)?

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra....

Also, read up on Americans stuck in Gaza with no way out.

"It limits the reimbursement to the cost of a reasonable commercial airfare."

How kind of them :)

I just mentioned it because the real cost must be much, much higher in many cases, and I imagined being on the hook for a million dollars.

True, but it is kinda like paying for insurance and then when you need it you get a giant surprise bill.

Although ironically much like the American health care insurance system which is much the same. Pay every month for “insurance”, and when you need it you also pay for it.

Fun times.

I did come to think of how a US ambulance ride could be more costly than being evacuated...

maybe we can get the Marines to start running ambulances regionally :)

slap a turret on the ambulance and it can be training for the corpsmen

This doesn't apply for the majority of Americans living abroad, in safe countries where the USA recognises the taxation.

(The US is only extracting someone from the UK if they've killed a teenager while driving drunk.)

> France is probably #2

I don't know what it's like for Americans living abroad but indeed, as a French citizen living abroad I do believe that France spends enough resources to justify taxing me (with guarantees against double taxation, and the various complications and edge cases it implies).

As far as I know, American citizens can't really vote abroad (they have to be registered to a place inside the US and vote by correspondence, I think?) while we have voting booths in most countries where France has a consulate[0].

Since there are many French citizens where I live, there were 14 booths across this country for the last elections so you're probably never more than 50 kilometers from one (in addition to being able to vote through Internet). There were 23 of them in the US, 33 in Canada (20 of them in Montreal apparently), etc.

That's a whole lot of effort for people who are voting for things that will not affect them directly and who don't pay taxes (even a token tax) for France, and it's great, and I think it's normal to devote efforts for all citizens wherever they are, but it means I couldn't honestly complain about reasonable taxation.

[0]https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000049516393

> As far as I know, American citizens can't really vote abroad (they have to be registered to a place inside the US and vote by correspondence, I think?) while we have voting booths in most countries where France has a consulate[0].

French expats also have their own representatives to the National Assembly, on top of voting for national elections (mostly presidential and the occasional referendum). It’s like if there were representatives for Europe in the US congress.

Honestly? Because they can't. If any other country had control of the world's reserve currency, they would do it, too.

It's the same reason why the US can place sanctions on Russian individuals in a way that, say, India cannot.

That is a completely warped and incorrect view. There is no political will to do so. I’ve never even seen it suggested even by the cringiest parties in any country in which I have lived. Besides, the simple fact that North Korea and Eritrea have comparable policies, and only them, is a strong indication that this idea is completely wrong. Neither has any kind of international clout to enforce this, and yet they have it for a reason.

Assuming that everyone else would do just like the US if they could get away with it is pure projection. Yes, it’s how the US work. No, it is not normal or even common.

> There is no political will to do so. I’ve never even seen it suggested even by the cringiest parties in any country in which I have lived.

No, you've just got MPs proposing to strip "tax exiles" of their citizenship and pointing to the US system at the same time: https://www.sudouest.fr/politique/depardieu-et-les-exiles-fi...

If you phrase it as "taxing expats" then, sure, no other country is proposing it. If you phrase it as "making sure the rich don't skip out on their taxes by moving to a low tax country" then it's going to be a lot more popular.

You realise that these things are completely different, right?

Stripping people from their citizenship as a punition for a crime has nothing to do with taxing people who renounce their citizenship. The only thing they have in common is that citizenship and taxes are involved. As an aside, because you mention France, there would be significant constitutional challenges to do this for something that is not high treason. It is not going to happen in the near future. The far right barks often, but when push comes to shove their only way to win votes is to soften their rhetoric and there is no support for this so they are not going to die on this hill.

> If you phrase it as "taxing expats" then, sure, no other country is proposing it.

That was the whole premise of the discussion, though.

> If you phrase it as "making sure the rich don't skip out on their taxes by moving to a low tax country" then it's going to be a lot more popular.

That's already being done. There is political will for that (though not from the fringe parties who'd be the most likely to go after expats, including the barking far right). It does not require sending a bill to people renouncing their citizenship, or taxing non-resident citizens.

I think it's because the US has the clout to indirectly compel foreign institutions to cooperate in a way that other western countries can't.

For example, for a US expat living in the UAE the various branches of the US government can threaten the UAE government, banks etc. to make them cooperate and tell them how much the US citizen is earning to ensure they pay their US taxes - if you're a bank anywhere in the world, you do not want to be cut off from the US dollar system.

If the UK, France, Germany etc. tried to tax their citizens globally it might work in other western countries, but in places like the Middle East they might struggle to get foreign entities to comply making it impossible to enforce.

Okay, well, “They do it because they have the power to” isn’t the moral argument I was originally presented with.