Only two nations tax their citizens who live abroad. One is a vicious dictatorship; the other the world's most powerful democracy. Does the U.S. want to share this distinction with Eritrea? It's true that most expatriate Americans end up with no U.S. taxes to pay on their worldwide income, because they can exclude some income and offset host country taxes against what remains. Yet all must file and many do pay, because anomalies are rife. Apart from this, the principle is simply wrong. It's for the sake of fairness that other countries base the taxation of their citizens on residence. After all, why demand taxes of people who don't benefit from the proceeds, who cannot use their countries' roads or schools or health care while abroad? What's more, because national tax structures tend to evolve into their own eccentrically balanced ecosystems, expatriates can easily be entangled in a complex web of taxation.
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