WOW "Why I’m Giving Up My Passport"

Jonathan Tepper, founder of Variant Perception, a macroeconomic research company and and co-author of Endgame: The End of the Debt SuperCycle and How It Changes Everything, is giving up his US passport. The "WOW" is because it is NYT that is actually publishing his essay.

Tepper writes:

THE mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who was born in New York and holds both American and British passports, recently said that he would not pay a tax bill from the United States on capital gains from the sale of his home in the London borough of Islington. Mr. Johnson pointed out that he hasn’t lived in America since he was 5. He’d like to renounce his citizenship, but said the process was “very difficult.”

It is, but I am doing it. My “in-person final loss of citizenship appointment” is scheduled for Jan. 14 at the United States Consulate here. My British passport, acquired in 2012, will be my only one.

Some 3,000 Americans gave up their citizenship last year, a tiny number that’s nevertheless been soaring...most, like me, are not tycoons. We’re responding to the burden and cost of onerous financial reporting and tax filing requirements that are neither fair nor just...

The challenges facing expat Americans abroad would disappear if the United States taxed and regulated only those who lived in America. Sadly, American politicians don’t care about Americans living abroad. It is easier to demonize us as tax dodgers than to fix irrational policies that no longer make sense in an interconnected world.