It’s sort of the flip side of the tagline from the movie “Field of Dreams”: Build it, and they will leave.
Barack Obama built it (although he would insist one person in the U.S. can’t build anything), and “they” are leaving in droves.
Last year was a banner one for Americans giving up their passports.
The number of U.S. citizens who revoked their status reached an all-time high of 3,415 people, a jump of 14 percent from 2013, according to deVere Group, a financial advisory firm.
Avoiding Uncle Sam appeared to be a prime motivator, after a new U.S. tax law was enacted that makes it harder to hide assets from authorities. A survey from deVere last year found that almost four out of five of its clients, who are primarily American expatriates, said they would consider handing in their passports because of the law, which is called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FACTA.
“Treasury Department data show that a steadily growing number of individuals have been giving up their U.S. citizenship over the last few years,” said deVere Group founder Nigel Green in a statement. “It can be reasonably assumed that this trend is in direct response to complying with the onerous, expensive and privacy-infringing FATCA, which finally came into effect on July 1 last year.”
Maybe this is what Obama had in mind when he spoke of “fundamentally transforming America.” Last November, after the American people soundly rejectted his brand of governance at the polls, he doubled down, unilaterally granting amnesty to 5 million illegal immigrants via executive fiat. The president speaks glowingly of the contributions these new Americans will make, seemingly oblivious to the fact that 47% of undocumented immigrants between the ages of 25 and 64 never graduated from high school (as compared with 8% of U.S.-born adults in the same age range).
Under his stewardship, welfare rolls and government dependence have grown dramatically. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 16 million children were on food stamps in 2014, compared with 9 million children in 2007, an increase of 78%. The population of the country, in case you’re wondering, grew by 5% during the same period, from 301 million to 319 million.
Obama has spoken repeatedly throughout his presidency about equality and leveling the playing field — about the rich doing their “fair share.” Just today in his weekly address, he spoke of giving children a fair shot by throwing more tax dollars into the black hole of federal education funding.
And now we find that he is chasing away the source of those tax dollars.
The U.S. may yet survive the harm visited on it by Barack Obama. The question is whether anyone will recognize the country he leaves behind him in two more years.
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