Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The Logic Chain

Obama wanting to tax millionaires less than Reagan makes him Stalin according to future tiny Badger-hole internee Grover Norquist. So that means Bin Laden is Trotsky?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Toronto Star Tuesday Sep. 20, 2011:
Protest US tax grab

The U.S. government is cracking down on what it calls offshore tax cheats. But it’s using a clumsy and unnecessarily harsh law that risks sideswiping hundreds of thousands of people living normal, law-abiding lives in Canada.

The people affected are U.S. citizens (there may be as many as a million of them) who have lived in Canada, often for decades, and mostly hold Canadian citizenship as well. Under a new U.S. law, they are being threatened with heavy financial penalties on all their bank accounts, RRSPs and other savings.

The United States has always required its citizens abroad to file tax returns. Until now that has been a formality for law-abiding U.S. citizens in Canada since they pay higher taxes here than they would south of the border, and so don’t end up owing anything. Now, however, the new U.S. law will require American citizens to report all foreign bank and brokerage accounts. An “amnesty” was offered until Sept. 9, but it carried onerous penalities of 5 to 25 per cent on accounts over $10,000.

It’s one thing to go after wealthy tax cheats; quite another to target ordinary Canadian residents with U.S. citizenship. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, to his credit, has rung the bell on their behalf, saying in a letter to leading U.S. publications that Washington is spreading “unnecessary stress and fear” among hundreds of thousands of people.

“These are honest and law-abiding people, including senior citizens now caught up in a nerve-wracking situation,” Flaherty wrote. “They are not high rollers with offshore bank accounts… These are people who have made innocent errors of omission that deserve to be looked upon with leniency.”

The U.S. will also attempt to require foreign (including Canadian) financial institutions to report their American clients to the Internal Revenue Service when the law goes into effect in 2013. This is an outrageous attempt to reach into Canadian jurisdiction; even the Canadian Bankers Association says the IRS is “conscripting financial institutions around the world to be arms of U.S. tax authorities.”

U.S. authorities have a legitimate interest in tracking down real tax scofflaws wherever they are. This isn’t the way to do it – and Ottawa is quite right to push back.

pansypoo said...

boo hoo.

JDM said...

Did anyone catch Ramon Mercader's new name? And what pp said.