She made you a moron ...... a potential H bomb

.1% (that's 1/10th of one percent) of the people exceed the total income of the other 99.9%? Wow! I somehow doubt there is one expat per every thousand whose annual income equals or exceeds the collective sum of the remaining 999.

And remember, income tax is on *income* so unless 1 out ever thousand expats makes 50 or 60 *million per year*, your bizarre assertion isn't very likely.

The people who are renouncing their citizenship for tax reasons definitely tend to be very high income people:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2013/05/09/trending-now-giving-up-u-s-citizenship/

Americans living abroad already paid income tax before FACTA. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act taxes investments and capital, and this is exactly what wealthy Americans living abroad protect when they renounce their United States citizenship. So any discussion of income tax is irrelevant to the topic of FACTA's impact on Americans living abroad renouncing their passports. The fact is that the approximately 6,000 Americans who renounced their citizenship possess exponentially greater wealth and capital than the other 1.7 million Mendax claimed lived abroad.

That is 6,000 that renounced beginning in 2009.

Anyone that is willing to renounce their citizenship over these tax hikes isn't even a true American.

This has got to be the most poorly-cited argument I've ever seen on this website.

At what tax rate *would* it be the act of a True American to renounce their citizenship? 50%? 80%? 99%? 100%?

Perhaps in the mind of an AverageWhiteBoy......

I will ignore the fact what I said is a tautology, and @Tolstoy I will not answer with a specific number (although in my opinion the tax rate in itself is not enough), but rather a question - what makes someone an American? A true American? What would you renounce your citizenship over? and finally is doing something as extreme as renouncing your citizenship and placing yourself outside of the 'american community' over small tax hikes the sign of a true american? I don't see it (the tax hike) breaking any core values of America, and I don't see someone renouncing their citizenship for material gain as a sign of someone that is committed to the community and truly values their identity - they seem to me to be someone that is an american for convenience, and they choose to stop being one for monetary convenience! maybe you guys can call that a true american, but I can't, and I'm happy to no longer have to call such people countrymen.

*Perhaps in the mind of an AverageWhiteBoy...... ;)

Since no-one has mentioned this yet, I will:

One of the largest contributors to the apparent surge in renunciations has been among US citizens living in Switzerland (source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-01/wealthy-americans-queue-to-give-up-passports-in-swiss-capital.html).

There was such a rush that the US embassy in Switzerland had to take on extra staff to process the renunciations. This appears to be because in the fallout from the scandals at UBS, one of Switzerland's biggest providers of personal banking services, various Swiss banks have re-evaluated their risk profiles of foreign-national personal banking customers. Due in part to FACTA, it would appear, they have decided that US citizens are a particularly high risk, and US citizens living in Switzerland have therefore found it more difficult to bank with domestic Swiss banks, some of whom are declining their custom.

According to Swiss government figures (cited in https://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/files/counting%20american%20civilians%20abroad.pdf), in 2008 there were around 17,000 US citizens living in Switzerland.

What this might suggest, in my analysis:

1. US citizens in Switzerland do not necessarily appear to object to paying US taxes, per se, but it would appear that they DO object to the fact that the US government's attempts to impose the FACTA regulations is making it harder for them to manage their finances, get mortgages and loans from Swiss banks, etc.

2. This has prompted a large number of US citizens living in Switzerland to renounce their American citizenship.

3. This is likely to be a temporary surge - during which those US citizens who were experiencing particular problems with Swiss banks queue up to renounce their citizenship.

4. Once this particularly Swiss phenomenon has run its course the rate of US citizens renouncing their citizenship may well return to a more stable level.

Hope that's of some interest.

Thanks for the info Jaime. I hadn't seen that. An excellent argument.

Thanks - I thought it was interesting enough to be worth adding to the thread. I'm not sure the Swiss situation is the only thing going on here, but it seems to be part of the issue.

I'm interested to see if the rate or renunciations increases or decreases in the third quarter in both the aggregate and in Switzerland in particular.

If Sqitzerland is still backlogged, it may continue for some time. We'd need to know how backlogged the Swiss embassy is to determine when we should look for a shift from hundreds per month to falling off.