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…