More Americans Choosing To Keep Citizenship Under Trump Than Obama
By listening to the liberal media, one would assume that the election of President Donald Trump transformed the United States of America into an authoritarian and dictatorial hellhole, one that all good and morally upstanding people would want to flee from.
That, coupled with the oft-promised but rarely followed through on vows to leave Trump’s America by angry Hollywood celebrities, would naturally result in some people anticipating a mass exodus of anti-Trump Americans fleeing for their lives to the safety of more democratic nations, such as Canada.
Yet, as noted, few if any of those Hollywood celebs who’ve threatened to leave America have actually done so, and there hasn’t been a mass exodus of American citizens fleeing the scourge of Trump’s oppressive regime. In fact, fewer Americans are renouncing their citizenship and leaving the country than during the previous administration.
In an op-ed published by The Daily Caller, Rudy Takala reported that the number of Americans who renounced their citizenship and left the country during the third quarter of 2018 has declined from the number who fled the country in 2017, which was also lower than the number who’d left during the same time period in former President Barack Obama’s final year in office.
Takala cited data published by the Internal Revenue Service in the Federal Register and said that at least 1,107 American citizens or Green Card holders renounced their citizenship or long-term residency in the third quarter of 2018.
That was a significant decline from the 1,376 who renounced their citizenship or residency in the third quarter of 2017, which in turn was down just a tick from the 1,380 who made a similar renouncement during the same time frame in 2016.
In all, the third quarter total for citizenship renouncement was down some 20 percent from a record high of 1,426 who had fled the country during the third quarter of 2015.
Indeed, the decline in Americans renouncing their citizenship is a welcome change from the Obama years, which saw a surge in the number of Americans who decided it was in their best interest to no longer hold U.S. citizenship.
That surge was fueled in large part by a tax bill passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress and signed into law by the former president in the early years of his administration, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.
That particular law required all American citizens and Green Card-holders who lived outside of the U.S. to file reports with the IRS detailing their financial accounts and transactions in foreign lands for tax purposes, which prompted a surge in renunciations to avoid that additional tax burden.
To combat the sudden exodus of American citizens, the Obama administration in 2014 actually increased the renunciation fee — a sort of exit tax — from a mere $450 to an incredible amount of $2,350, but even that failed to dissuade the thousands who had decided it was time to go.
It is worth noting that, prior to Obama signing the FATCA bill into law, fewer than 1,000 people renounced their citizenship on an annual basis. Sadly, that number grew to reach a record high of 5,411 total citizenship renunciations in 2016, a number that began to decline once Trump took office.
In 2017, a total of 5,133 individuals renounced their citizenship. Thus far over the first three quarters of 2018, a total of 3,296 people have renounced their citizenship, meaning that other than a sudden last-minute surge of renunciations over the remainder of the year, the total number of those who’ve fled the U.S. will have declined again.
Despite all of the dire predictions from the liberal media — they were certain that 2017 renunciation totals would dwarf those of the Obama years — Americans are not fleeing in droves during Trump’s presidency. No, that is what happened between 2011 and 2016, while the media’s idol Obama held power.
Contrary to the media’s wishful thinking, the vast majority of Americans are not living in fear of their lives or their rights, and the form of “democracy” we practice in this constitutional Republic remains alive and well, not dying darkness, as some would have you believe.
Americans renounced their citizenship and fled the country in record numbers during Obama’s tenure in office to avoid his punitive tax policies, but as Trump has changed all of that, far fewer Americans are deciding to skip the country than before and more are inclined to remain here and reap the benefits of less punitive tax policies and a much-improved economy, which is really what this is all about.
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