Lesson on migration: Whenever a place becomes so intolerable that people cannot bear to stay, where they go to makes little difference to them. How bad a place is can me gauged by how many difference places those people find themselves in after moving. Obviously, America is getting difficult, but, measured by the variety of places people are escaping to, it is far from intolerable.

I am a US citizen, born and raised as such. I do spend an inordinate amount of time outside our borders and often in the company of expats. My conjecture on the rise in renunciation cases is that this is from American´s already living abroad, now tiring of paying taxes to their new country and also having to pay US taxes as well. Few, if any are fleeing the US, they left years ago.

FTA: "The harsh reality is that Death by Double Taxation is the fate of Americans renouncing their citizenship to the Brits."

This is confused and confusing. One of the many problems with our tax system is taxation by citizenship. If you are an American, no matter where you live and work in the world, you must file a full U.S. tax return. This is true even if you earned no income and possessed no property in the U.S. and lived, worked and paid all your taxes in another country. There are some deductions and offsets, but it´s twice the bureaucracy and tax double jeopardy if U.S. tax law is different. So Americans abroad are working, raising their families, paying local taxes for all the local services they do consume, and then paying U.S. taxes for all the services they do not need or use at all-- roads, schools, police, firemen, and all those Federal government services that no sane individual needs or wants. (The U.S. military is, as always, the exception to this statement).

(Cont.) The statement from the article I quoted above is exactly wrong. Britain may indeed be a worse welfare hive than the U.S. but the question facing American expatriates is this: How many parasites must I support? The only way for Americans working abroad to avoid double taxation and recurring tax enemas is to renounce their citizenship. More and more Americans are doing exactly that, particularly those with upcoming U.S. estate/death taxes threatening to destroy their life savings to support a bunch of Obamaphiles who just want free stuff. Atlas is shrugging. All around us.