The State Department has slashed by about 80% the fee for Americans to formally renounce their U.S. citizenship.
After years of legal battles with several groups representing Americans wanting to give up their citizenship, the department on Friday published a final rule in the Federal Register that reduces the cost from $2,350 to $450.
The new fee, which took effect on Friday, had been promised in 2023 but had never been implemented. The cost is now the same as it was when the State Department first started charging Americans to formally renounce their citizenship in 2010.
There’s a fee for that??? How about a double 🖕🖕as your fee, how’s that? If I renounce citizenship, it’s because I am fucking tired of it all and see the country as completely unredeemable-- aka hate. I ain’t paying you shit.
And your name is published on a public list of people that have given up their citizenship.
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
I recently learned you can still get your social security benefits even when you’re not a citizen.
Good. The value of being an American is in a death spiral.
Can we perhaps trade citizenship with a Canadian Trump supporter?
too bad only RICH canadian ones would do that.
It’s almost like they have the perfect confluence of things to encourage brain drain:
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Put idiots like Bobby Brainworm in charge of health so they can do battle with proven science.
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Cut funding of science way, way down. I mean really, letting a complete poseur idiot like fElon decide things like that? WTAF.
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Unleash regressive dumbasses to do their worst xenophobic bullshit.
Seriously, someone needs to demonstrate how everything Donvict’s crime wave is doing to this country is not a wishlist of the likes of Russia.
- slash education all across the board which benefits both parties at least the old guard “dinos”, plus increasing propaganda of anti-intellectualism
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It’s like they’re daring me at this point.
I don’t want to leave this country. I was born here, my dad was born here, my dad’s dad was born here, etc. But, holy shit, this society is failing. It’s not failed, yet, but it is failing. I want to believe that things can turn around, but it gets harder everyday to hold onto that belief.
It’s especially hard because I feel like my proposals for how things could be fixed are actively, aggressively being fought against by many of my countrymen. Hell, we can’t even agree on the problems, let alone solutions. For a lot of Americans, there is no problem! This is all hunky-dory.
A nation is a shared idea. A nation exists when a group of people all agree that they are a nation. I ain’t in the same nation as these folks. They’ve got their idea of America and I’ve got mine, and they are two different things. I’m not a part of the shared idea anymore. It’s moved away from me. It’s become something that I don’t understand or agree with. I don’t think it’s moral or rational, or sustainable.
Frankly, I think the idea of America as a nation, as it stands right now, is doomed to fail. It’s far too tolerant of greed, ignorance and liars with malicious intent. A society like that won’t last. It will collapse.
Sort of. If you are smart enough to leave, that’s one less voter they have to deal with.
There’s also a whole other slew of issues that affect Accidental Americans usually having to do with non-filed taxes, meaning the whole process also recoups from global earnings that have had zilch to do with the US through tax traps. Making it easier to apply for means they can get a few bucks more, and I suspect the people processing those requests are at the ICE level of quality. William Barr’s daughter, Mary Barr Daly, ended up being placed as a senior adviser to FinCEN, which is closely involved in this process, and she has her own history of exercising her position in let’s just say the traditional Republican manner.
To be fair, both parties have been at fault for the US’ Eritrean system of citizenship, neither really cares, although I suspect with how many bridges they are burning they are seeing the writing on the wall and would rather get something from the people trying to leave “the right way” while their demands on the global banking system are still respected.
When was the last time a country actually collapsed? You’ve got Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and the USSR. Forgoing the USSR, you don’t see many countries of this size doing the whole “collapse” thing, these days. I think it’s far more likely that worst case scenario tends toward reshaping American culture toward more toxicity, corruption, … other nations will slowly stop relying on the US for its economic reliability, stable bonds, … you’ll have less sway over international politics. Locally, your markets will lose the vigor provided when an economy yields fair chance to make gains. People who rise to power in your new nation will be those who pay or promise the most to a small handful of elitists. National response to disasters will become dull. People will be radicalized, but also less educated. Public violence will increase. All of this will happen while your foreign state enemies watch and fill the void you’ve left. You’ll never get that position back… just as Rome didn’t. Just as Spain didn’t. Just as the UK didn’t. You’ll be a nation that just fades to the sidelines. Still relevant in some ways, but definitely not anything like you used to be.
It’s frustrating living in a state that is pursuing good values, and then we vote federally and lose to morons. What can I do? Move to these shitholes? There’s a lot of possible improvements to the system, but we need to cross a threshold to get over to get that done and IDK if we can. I have young kids and grapple with uprooting them. The next couple of years will be very telling.
Nice. As an American living in Spain, this will be nice when the time comes. Now, if I could only speed up my citizenship here so I can file sooner.
If you were born in the USA, still live here, have no other citizenship and drop the $450 to renounce - what happens?
Part of the requirement for renouncing is (or at least should be) that you have established citizenship somewhere else. Otherwise you would be considered stateless, which causes all kinds of problems. Everything from being unable to access government benefits, to not being able to get an ID.
I say “should be” because the US is one of the few attending countries that refused to sign the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness
refused to sign
As an aside, it is this annoying thing with American exceptionalism in regards to certain issues that makes it anathema to the concept of a United Nations, despite it being a founding member-nation.
I don’t think you can, there are some conventions around this. https://www.unhcr.org/what-we-do/protect-human-rights/ending-statelessness/un-conventions-statelessness
So unless you have a second one the conventions prevent them.
You must declare taxes even if living abroad
You must file, but the US has reciprocal tax treaties with many countries, which allow you to deduct any taxes you paid in your home country. So if you paid $15k in taxes in Spain, you would be able to put that towards any taxes you owed in the US.
Of course, you still have to actually file your taxes in the US. Which is a massive pain in the ass, because the US tax code is kept intentionally convoluted so people will feel the need to pay for tax software. The tax software companies literally lobby congress to keep the codes complicated. In most other countries, the government basically just sends a mailer that says “hey here’s what we have on file. Let us know if you have any corrections.”
TURBOTAX being the major beneficiary of this.
You can use https://www.freetaxusa.com/ while it’s still available. Even if it doesn’t support all your cases you can at least get started.
Off subject a bit, but I just heard Rubio lied about his shoe size to the president that’s been handing out free shoes everyone feels compelled to wear, and that he’s been wearing those oversized shoes because he was too vain to be honest.
Fuck you Rubio.
What I read was that Trump has been guessing the shoe sizes and people don’t want to correct him.
Looks like it really might have vanity for Rubio:
As Vice President J.D. Vance recalled at an event in December, the Journal reported, he was meeting with Trump, Rubio, and an unnamed third politician in the Oval Office when the president accused Vance and Rubio of having “shitty shoes.” Trump asked them all for their shoe size; Vance made sure to put in the record that he’s a size 13, while Rubio claimed to be an 11 and the third man a 7. The president then launched a sideways insult at the guy with the daintiest feet: “You know you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.”
That the “locker-room talk” president would place an inordinate, genital-related premium on a man’s foot size was surely no surprise to Rubio, who has risen in GOP influence in direct proportion to his willingness to contort himself to Trump’s exact desires. It does not seem out of the realm of possibility, then, that Rubio would inflate his own shoe specs to impress Trump with his masculine bulk.
holy fucking trump! I could have left the country and renouced citizenship for free before 2010? ugh I so wish I would have studied abroad when I was young.
Tempting, though I’d rather they do the work for me
passdid not read that properly seems like a deal for AmericansFor real. Wake me when they’re paying - in cash.
That was not the expensive part. The expensive part is when they calculate the future taxes that they won’t receive and take a share of that. Edit: if you are above a threshold.
