Well, they have to be citizens of SOME country, and it is unlikely they can just pick one.
Take my son, for example: both his parents are American, and he was born in South Africa (but his SA birth certificate says “ALIEN” in big letters, and he is not entitled to SA citizenship). He spent the first year of his life living in Mozambique, then about 3.5 years in Indonesian, then 5.5 years in Egypt, and now he is back in Indonesia. While he has been to the US on a number of occasions, he has never lived there.
But no other country is going to take him! He is the son of US citizens, therefore he too is a US citizen. And we need his passport all the time - for travel, to get him enrolled in school, etc. etc.
As an adult, even if he elected never to travel internationally, he would still need a passport, most likely, unless he was going to be a hermit in the woods some place. Maybe there are countries where you can live as a foreigner without ever being asked for documentation of any kind, but it would be impossible in all the places I’ve lived (we need special visas that permit us to stay long term in the country). Renting a house, buying a car, enrolling in college, taking a loan, getting a paycheck - these are all bureaucratic hurdles that would be tough to do entirely “off the books.” And to be “on the books,” you need to be a citizen of somewhere.
For that and related reasons, I have no intrinsic problem with paying some reduced level of US taxes even though I don’t live stateside. But since most other countries don’t require it, it does put Americans and American companies at a disadvantage internationally. For that reason, I wish they would stop it.
Even so, no other civilised country expects their citizens to pay taxes on what they’ve earned living overseas.
CairoCarol and her partner could be, say, from New Zealand, and their son could be in the same position, and they’d have all the benefits of New Zealand citizenship without the IRD breathing down their neck asking about their earnings during their five year stay in Egypt.
I suppose it depends on what you call “civilised”, but I believe Poland taxes wages earned abroad (at least that seems to come up a lot in the complaints of Polish citizens living here in Ireland).
Frankly, given the choice between the two, I much prefer having to file a tax return once a year to risking being yanked into military service every time I go home to visit Mom and Dad.
My understanding is that this reason, rather than considerations of fairness, is why the US Chamber of Commerce fights getting rid of the exemption (and probably would like to see the exemption increased). US labor is more expensive abroad, and hence Americans are at a competitive advantage (as are US companies operating abroad who want to employee Americans).
Except that they would be stateless… in the case I know of where American parents had a child born in Saudi Arabia. You do not get Saudi citizenship just by being born there and there is no way to gain citizenship without a Saudi parent.
Um… ok, don’t you think this kind of changes your argument just a little bit? The way you were portraying it earlier, the US government was demanding taxes from these people without giving them anything in return. That’s obviously not the case if the alternative to having US citizenship is statelessness.
Well, then if you are going to be born outside the country of your parents nationality and live there, it is better if you are not born to American parents. Much better to be British, Aussie, Kiwi, Canadian, German or just about any other Western nationality.