EDITORIAL: U.S. wrongly ups penalty for fleeing citizens

Across the developed world, the freedom of movement is considered an absolute human right. That freedom includes not only the ability to move within a country, but the right to leave a country without punishment.

Increasingly, the United States doesn’t recognize that right.

As reported by Canada’s Globe and Mail, nearly 1,600 Americans renounced their citizenship during the first half of 2014. That number exceeds last year’s pace, when a record 3,000 Americans left for other shores, and it marks a significant jump from the mid-1990s and early 2000s, when only a few hundred Americans handed over their passports each year.

Also increasing, however, is the fee for abandoning U.S. citizenship. As of Sept. 12, the fee will increase to $2,350 — up $1,900 from the $450 it used to cost to leave the country. The fee is more than 20 times the average cost other countries charge people for renouncing their citizenship, and it is levied on top of the already-aggressive exit taxes that extricate sizable sums from U.S. expatriates.

The State Department says the increased fees will help pay for the increased workload associated with the increased number of people who are leaving the country. But the amount of money the bloated federal bureaucracy wastes each year makes that explanation more than a little suspect. The massive fee hike comes off as yet one more opportunistic money grab by a government that already is helping itself to too much of our cash. The more money our government takes, the more money it says it needs.

It’s one more punishment from an administration that considers avoidance of America’s uncompetitive tax rates unpatriotic. How free are we if we must sacrifice our personal property and wealth just to leave this country? The rest of the developed world learned from the tyranny of the Iron Curtain. How long before U.S. Customs mirrors post-revolution Cuba, when Fidel Castro’s state security officers stormed airport ticket counters to seize anything and everything — including luggage, personal photos, watches, jewelry, children’s toys and other items — belonging to those fleeing the island nation?

Why don’t our leaders ask our soon-to-be-former countrymen why they are abandoning the American dream, and then work to create a nation no one person or company would ever dream of leaving? Instead of the stick, how about the carrot of corporate and income tax reform? We need lower rates with fewer loopholes. We need to reward risk, not punish success.

It’s bad enough to have tax policies that scream, “If you don’t like it, leave.” It’s even worse when leaving is as bad as staying.