New Taxes for Expatriots

It seems that WPIUSH (see my previous post for explanation of this acronym) and the previous Congress have decided to sock it to expats like Pam and me, by taxing income that we earn here in Canada. Yes, you read that right. For US citizens living abroad, they are seeing a substantial rise in their taxes on income earned outside the US, leading a few (and more in time, I expect) to renounce their US citizenship.

If we weren’t so near to the US and traveling back and forth across the border frequently to visit friends and family as well as do business, I suspect that we’d be contemplating the same (after we get our Canadian citizenship, of course). As it is, we’ll see a substantial premium that we now have to pay in order to maintain our US citizenship. Talk about a slap in the face for those already disgusted with the current administration.

In a way, it’s like Father, like Son. It was George H. W. Bush who removed the tax deduction for medical insurance by the self-employed, which ended up costing me twice as much as anyone else as a consultant, and eventually led to me taking a job with a company partly to get corporate Health Insurance. It’s amazing how WPIUSH uses taxes like a multi-purpose weapon, employing tax cuts for rich supporters and huge hikes to those who obviously aren’t his constituency.

If doing 2 sets of taxes wasn’t a pain already! I’d almost like to see them try and collect if we didn’t pay. I suppose they’d catch us at the border.

A Complex Correction

The LA Times has done me the favor of correcting my somewhat innacurate description of how a Prime Minister comes to power in Canada:

A Nov. 25 commentary incorrectly stated how the prime minister is selected in Canada. Under the Canadian Constitution, the governor general — the personal representative of the reigning monarch of the Commonwealth Realm — appoints as prime minister the leader of the political party that has the most seats in the House of Commons, the lower house of Canada’s Parliament.

Thanks, but I’m still not sure I understand this completely yet. So the Conservatives got the most seats in the House of Commons? I thought we had a ‘Minority Government’, where Parliament could override any of Harper’s initiatives (kind of like the somewhat tenuous majority that the US Democrats have in Congress, which was, of course, the subject of that Op. Ed.). The Governor General is “personal representative of the reigning monarch of the Commonwealth Realm”? Does that mean the Queen? I don’t believe that Her Highness Queen Elizabeth chose Michaëlle Jean to be her representative. Who did, then? My fellow Canadian bloggers, help me out here…