Ultrawealthy Americans are ditching their US citizenship in droves
With tax hikes maybe on the way for America's ultrawealthy, many of them don't want to stick around to see them, Axios reported.
www.businessinsider.com
Interesting article. I can see a global minimum personal income tax coming
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More of America's wealthiest citizens don't want to be American anymore, according to new data compiled by Axios.
In 2020, according to IRS data, 6,707 Americans gave up their citizenship — a 237% increase from the prior year. The rise is pronounced among some of the wealthiest people, who have been leaving at elevated rates since 2016 (with a notable dip in 2019).
Insider previously reported the US passport lost a big chunk of its value in 2020. Some of the reasons the richest Americans wanted to flee were the handling of the pandemic, general social unrest, and, perhaps most importantly, the presidential election.
At the time, America's wealthiest people were having a hard time finding a way out of the country, even for vacation, since so many countries weren't allowing Americans in.
Nuri Katz, the founder of Apex Capital, a firm that specializes in citizenship by investment programs, previously told Insider the wealthy had to adjust to not being able to travel for work or pleasure — which led to a desire to "diversify" passports.
Now, Axios reported, one concern propelling the wealthy out of the country might be taxes. President Joe Biden has proposed tax raises targeting the highest-earning Americans in an effort to pay for infrastructure spending. Those include a 39.6% capital-gains tax on Americans earning over $1 million, which would be levied in conjunction with a 3.8% Affordable Care Act tax. That would result in a 43.4% capital-gains tax for that group, nearly double current levels.
A report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that the top 1% of American taxpayers would shoulder the burden of Biden's proposed tax increases, each paying an extra $100,000 in taxes every year.
The status of those tax increases is still up in the air, since they didn't make it into the latest bipartisan infrastructure bill. They could still show up in the party-line reconciliation bill that's being written by Democrats, but perhaps at not such elevated rates.
But, according to Axios, the prospective tax hikes might still be a dealbreaker for some wealthy Americans.
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