The menacing specter of state bankruptcy drew ever nearer. The old remedy was prescribed: reduction in the value of the currency and increased taxation. . . . Thus began the fierce endeavor of the State to squeeze the population to the last drop. Since economic resources fell short of what was needed the strong fought to secure the chief share for themselves with the violence and unscrupulousness well in keeping with the origin of those in power. . . .
In these disturbed and catastrophic decades of the third century countless people, especially of the bourgeois middle class, were impoverished, even ruined, and these were precisely the men who had brought into being and maintained the economic prosperity of former times. The wasteful policy of the State, the constant interference with private economic life, and the inflations, amounted to a landslide beneath which a vast amount that was of value was crushed out of existence.
—The Cambridge Ancient History, Volume XI
Collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. Fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice. Many nations in history, at the very peak of their power, affluence and glory, see leaders arise, run amok with imperial visions and sabotage themselves, their people and their nation.
—Niall Ferguson, The Rise and Fall of the American Empire
To most people, the idea that we could be approaching the End of America is preposterous. After all, the United States has been the world’s foremost economy for a century. Almost no one now living can recall a time when any country other than the United States was on top of the world. In fact, it requires a good education today to decipher Walter Lippmann’s belief that “what Rome was to the ancient world, what Great Britain has been to the modern world, America is to be to the world of tomorrow.”1
How quickly tomorrow has come and gone. It lasted for a generation or so after World War II, and while it did, American workers were far the most highly compensated people on earth.
In 1960, German, Belgian, French, and British workers all earned less than one-third of the typical American income. At that time, the typical income in Japan was just one-tenth that of Americans. Swedes were exceptional in having attained 45 percent of the average U.S. wage.
Then in 1971, Richard Nixon repudiated the gold reserve standard. The countdown to national bankruptcy began in earnest as ticking time bombs destined to explode the American Dream were laid and set. The robust income growth that Americans had previously enjoyed came to a screeching halt, while incomes abroad soared. By 1978, American workers took home 20 percent less than Swedish and Belgian workers. German and Dutch workers also earned a premium over the U.S. income. Japanese income soared from 10 percent of the U.S. level to 68 percent in less than two decades.
Of course, it is important to recognize that much of the downward shift in the relative wealth of Americans came from a sharp decline in the exchange rate of the dollar. As William Easterly observed, the unweighted cross-country world average of gross domestic product (GDP) growth in 131 countries slowed from about 5 percent in the third quarter of the twentieth century to about 3 percent in the 1970s and 1980s. The worldwide average public debt to GDP ratio also rose steeply in the 1970s and 1980s.2
In other words, Nixon’s unilateral revision of the world monetary system, scrapping the link to gold, preceded a dramatic drop in world average GDP growth. It also led an even sharper decline in relative U.S. wealth as the exchange value of the dollar plunged.
As I write, 40 years later, the U.S. balance of trade has been in deficit ever since. And the dollar has lost more than 80 percent of its 1971 value. (Seen in terms of gold, the dollar’s depreciation is even more dramatic. At the current price of gold as I write, $1,506, the dollar retains just a little over 2 percent of its 1971 value in gold.)
As we discussed in Chapter 6, no one noticed it at the time, but the shift away from gold in the monetary system to pure fiat money led to debt-driven consumption as the main driver of economic growth. Indeed, as I mentioned, when Nixon abolished fixed exchange rates by severing the dollar’s link to gold in 1971, the United States was the world’s largest creditor. No longer. The move to fiat money resulted in a wholesale substitution of debt for capital in the U.S. economy. This was driven by the decline in per capita global energy output that undermined a key component in the growth recipe of the U.S. economy. It was amplified by the hydraulic force of the largest, cumulative trade deficit the world had ever seen.
From 1971 through 2010, the current account accumulated trade deficits of the United States totaled $7.75 trillion. By accounting identity, when the United States runs a trade deficit, it necessarily borrows an equivalent sum from foreign creditors. Four decades of accelerating trade deficits have hollowed out the capitalist system in the United States, concentrating wealth among the creditworthy and eliminating real income growth among average Americans.
Real average hourly wages in the United States peaked at $20.30 per hour (in today’s dollars) in January 1973, on the eve of the first oil shock. Over the next 22 years, the average real hourly wage plummeted to $16.39. The only reason U.S. households have achieved higher real earnings is the influx of women into the workforce, which led to two-earner households. Of course, these data are subject to varying interpretations. Some economists argue that the fall in real income may be exaggerated by deficiencies in the government’s calculation of inflation. No doubt there are such deficiencies—but whether they all tend to exaggerate inflation is more problematic.
We could argue the minutia of real income comparisons. Yet a dramatic change in trend in the early 1970s is indisputable. For the tens of millions of middle-class Americans classified as “non-supervisory production workers” in government statistics, the post–January 1973 stagnation in real hourly income represents a dramatic departure from the experience of preceding years.
Look at it this way. From 1947 to January 1973, average hourly pretax earnings, adjusted for inflation using current methods, grew at an average annual “real” rate of about 2.2 percent. If real income had continued to grow at that robust rate, average purchasing power would have doubled to more than $40 an hour by 2006. Instead, it fell to less than $18.00, almost 12 percent lower than at its peak a working lifetime ago.
More often than not the parents of my generation who expected their children to have more prosperous lives than their own were disappointed. I was born into the Golden Age of the Middle Class. Then, in February 1973, it suddenly and permanently ended.
When Nixon acted to sever the dollar’s link to gold, domestic oil production had just peaked, and the United States was the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. Factory jobs provided high income for relatively unskilled and less educated people. But the transition away from a capitalist to a debtist economy accelerated change in everything. It changed the focus of economic activity in the United States as measured by GDP, from genuine wealth creation to debt-driven consumption.
Unlike a capitalist economy where profits are based upon actually producing goods that consumers wish to buy in an environment of rising incomes, a debtist economy enshrines cost-cutting consumption in the face of stagnant or falling incomes. Americans exploited the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency to bully and borrow trillions through the current account deficit to live beyond our means. As the world’s foremost military power, Americans forced oil producers to price crude in dollars. As consumers of last resort, Americans borrowed the money to enjoy a higher standard of living than they could afford, and that destined them to be cost-sensitive. As the process unfolded over 40 years, it was only a matter of time until underemployed Americans lined up to buy Chinese goods at Wal-Mart.
For those Americans who lacked the skills to be appreciably more productive than Chinese peasants on an assembly line, the opening of low-wage economies implied the end of the middle-class lifestyle. Instead of a broad middle class where up to 90 million Americans were subsumed together as “non-supervisory production workers” whose prospects improved year in and year out, the prospects of the former middle-class diverged.
The less educated and less skilled segment who worked in the tradable goods sector sank toward poverty. As Harvard economics professor Edward L. Glaeser has shown, population growth in the least educated three-fifths of U.S. counties was less than 3 percent over the past decade. By contrast, in the one-fifth of U.S. counties where more than 21 percent of adults had college degrees in 2000, growth for the decade was over 13 percent.3 A minority of skilled entrepreneurs, along with the highly educated, a total of about 13.2 million persons, became highly successful—earning more than $100,000 per year.
Another strand of the population continued to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle, but one financed at the general expense. Among those whose skills were not internationally competitive, government employees were exceptional in enjoying growing incomes along with such perks as defined benefit pensions and full-spectrum health care coverage.
Unfortunately, as the Romans discovered in the waning days of their empire, it is impossible for government spending to take up the slack in the shriveling private economy on a long-term basis.
For one thing, the resources to fund intervention at the necessary magnitude are not readily available. The weaker the economy becomes, the more tax receipts fall away. Although it is not widely recognized, by 2011 real per capita tax receipts in the United States had fallen to 1994 levels. In other words, GDP growth over the past 17 years was financed from deficits and debt. In fact, net private GDP has barely budged over the past decade.
While some of the gains in consumption since 1994 were funded on credit cards and through cash-out financing of appreciated real estate equity, the greatest contributor to consumption came from soaring government spending. For the decade since 2001 government spending added a total of $25.94 trillion to GDP.4
Note another ominous aspect of the situation. Notwithstanding the invisibly low interest rates maintained by the Federal Reserve through the first decade of this century, the national debt compounded far faster than the growth of the net private economy upon which the hope of repayment lies.
GDP minus government spending grew from $9.314 9 trillion in 2001 to $9.721 5 trillion in 2010—a gain of just 0.043 percent over a decade.5 At that truly medieval rate of growth, it would take the net private economy 167 years to double.
That kind of growth rate predates the Industrial Revolution.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, annual growth rates from 0 to 1 percent led to low incomes because they provided too little buffer against the inevitable negative shocks of war, famine, and pestilence. This appears to have been true in medieval England, where real farm wages, measured by half century, showed no improvement in the productivity of the economy from the years 1200 to 1249 to the years 1600 to 1649.6
While growth of the productive economy in the United States over the past decade was negligible, the national debt soared from $5.807 trillion in 2001 to $13.561 trillion in 20107—a gain of 133 percent.8 The burden of the national debt compounded more than 3,000 times faster than the productive economy grew.
Those who draw their bearings by looking at the gross GDP numbers to justify a vibrant economy have lost the plot. GDP attributable to government spending, especially deficit spending, is bogus. It is not real prosperity but debt-financed consumption with unpleasant implications for your future.
The U.S. government is doomed to bankruptcy. Indeed, it is already bankrupt. Never in the history of the world has any government owed as much money as the U.S. Treasury owes today.
As mentioned previously, Professor Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University, an economist expert in government debt, has calculated that the true indebtedness of the U.S. Treasury is greater than the combined GDPs of all countries. Yes, it is true that the debts of the United States are denominated in U.S. dollars—a currency that the government can create at little or no cost. This only means that the dollar is destined to collapse. If your income and wealth are inexorably tied to dollars, you could be wiped out.
Kotlikoff suggests that the IMF has already endorsed a remedy–the doubling of taxes in the United States:
. . .you will find that the IMF has effectively pronounced the U.S. bankrupt. Section 6 of the July 2010 Selected Issues Paper says: “The U.S. fiscal gap associated with today’s federal fiscal policy is huge for plausible discount rates.” It adds, “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP.”
The fiscal gap is the value today (the present value) of the difference between projected spending (including servicing official debt) and projected revenue in all future years. . . .
To put 14 percent of gross domestic product in perspective, current federal revenue totals 14.9 percent of GDP. So the IMF is saying that closing the U.S. fiscal gap, from the revenue side, requires, roughly speaking, an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal-income, corporate and federal taxes as well as the payroll levy set down in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act.9
The problem is that any attempt to double taxes would crush the economy. And, of course, it is clear that there is little appetite for spending cuts as drastic as would be required to even balance the budget on an accrual basis that, as Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President and CEO John C. Williams has calculated, is trillions of dollars out of whack on an accrual basis.
Forget about achieving an appreciable surplus that would retire some of the national debt. U.S. government debt will never be repaid except for whatever part of it may be extinguished by inflation. That will come directly out of your hide.
Face it: you are an extra caught in the remake of a bad movie.
There is an ominous precedent for the destiny of the United States in the fall of the Roman Empire. We are far poorer than we think. The irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies of the United States government are primed to make Americans poorer still.
Contrary to what many may naively suppose, more energetic efforts to tax the rich are likely to result in an even tighter squeeze on those of lower means.
Consider this from Bruce Bartlett’s work titled “How Excessive Government Killed Ancient Rome.” Bartlett is a columnist for the Economix blog of the New York Times, the Fiscal Times, and Tax Notes:
As the private wealth of the Empire was gradually confiscated or taxed away, driven away or hidden, economic growth slowed to a virtual standstill. Moreover, once the wealthy were no longer able to pay the state’s bills, the burden inexorably fell onto the lower classes, so that average people suffered as well from the deteriorating economic conditions. In Rostovtzeff’s words, “The heavier the pressure of the state on the upper classes, the more intolerable became the condition of the lower classes.” (Rostovtzeff 1957: 430). . . .
Although the fall of Rome appears as a cataclysmic event in history, for the bulk of Roman citizens it had little impact on their way of life. As Henri Pirenne (1939: 33-62) has pointed out, once the invaders effectively had displaced the Roman government they settled into governing themselves. At this point, they no longer had any incentive to pillage, but rather sought to provide peace and stability in the areas they controlled. After all, the wealthier their subjects the greater their taxpaying capacity. . . .
In conclusion, the fall of Rome was fundamentally due to economic deterioration resulting from excessive taxation, inflation, and over-regulation. Higher and higher taxes failed to raise additional revenues because wealthier taxpayers could evade such taxes while the middle class—and its taxpaying capacity—were exterminated. Although the final demise of the Roman Empire in the West (its Eastern half continued on as the Byzantine Empire) was an event of great historical importance, for most Romans it was a relief.10
Of course, the United States is not going to be pillaged by Germanic tribes. But what you can expect, as suggested in the passage quoted from the Cambridge Ancient History, volume 11, is a Roman-style response as “the menace of state bankruptcy” draws nearer.11
You will see a replay of “the fierce endeavor of the State to squeeze the population to the last drop.” The amount of squeezing will be prodigious as the United States is well and truly insolvent. The first danger is that taxes will be raised to confiscatory levels—on the wealthy.
Like the original Alternative Minimum Tax, the new, higher rates will apply at first only to a small segment of the population. But as the continued emissions of new dollars conjured out of thin air inevitably devalue the currency, the price level will skyrocket, and you will end up earning, millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars, making you one of the “wealthy” to whom the new “taxes on the rich” will apply.
The greatest danger to your living standard therefore is the looming menace of hyperinflation and the death of the dollar. We are approaching what I previously mentioned Ludwig von Mises describing as “the crack-up boom” and I expect “a final and total catastrophe of the currency involved” . . . namely the dollar.
Standard & Poor’s “downgrade” on U.S. credit during August 2011 merely underscored the underlying weakness that has been evident for years now. Many more people than you may have already begun to believe in the coming bankruptcy of the United States. This is reflected in something I heard from an American living in Geneva. He had just been visiting with some consular official who works in the American Embassy in Bern. The woman from the embassy told him something astonishing—that the wait for the exit interviews required to renounce U.S. citizenship now exceeds three years. This statistic reflects a swelling recognition by successful Americans that U.S. citizenship is a major liability.
The fact that it requires a formal exit interview at the embassy to escape from U.S. tax liabilities reflects the enactment of increasingly draconian restrictions on emigration from the United States. U.S. citizenship carries more fiscal burdens than that of any other country. U.S. citizens alone, among leading economies, must pay U.S. taxes whether they reside in the United States or not. An April 5, 2010, article by the Dow Jones News Service explains,
Unlike most jurisdictions, the U.S. taxes the income of citizens and green-card holders no matter where in the world it is earned.
In order to give up U.S. citizenship, a person must obtain or have citizenship in another country. The person surrenders their passport or green card during an interview with a consular officer in their new home country. He or she must also submit a form, including a list of assets, to the IRS to complete the process.
Chris Kavanagh of the American Institute in Taiwan, which represents U.S. interests in Taiwan, said 43 people gave up their U.S. citizenship in Taiwan in 2009, the highest that figure has been since 2003. He cautioned against drawing conclusions from that data, however.
The IRS says some of the swelling of numbers of expatriations towards the end of 2009 occurred because the agency made a push to notify people that had already surrendered their passport, but had not completed the process by submitting the IRS form. Until that form is received by the IRS, these people are still subject to U.S. tax. “There is some catch-up going on,” said IRS spokesman Bruce Friedland.
The stock market plunge of late 2008 and early 2009 may also have played a role in the spike in expatriations. Since 2008, Americans with net worth greater than $2 million have had to pay an exit tax assessed on their assets. With gains reduced or wiped out by the market collapse, those seeking to give up their U.S. citizenship had an opportunity to do so with less exit tax required.12
So-called exit taxes, the fiscal equivalent of the Berlin Wall, have been imposed to prevent successful Americans from escaping a lopsided tax burden in which 73 percent of income taxes are paid by the top 10 percent of earners, while the bottom 40 percent actually receive “refunds” having paid nothing.13
Recall the attitude of the Roman Empire as it faced bankruptcy, succinctly summarized in the quote from Cambridge Ancient History at the beginning of this chapter: “Thus began the fierce endeavor of the State to squeeze the population to the last drop.”
A little-appreciated provision of President Barack Obama’s “highway legislation,” Senate Bill 1813, Section 40304, says that “Revocation or denial of passport in case of certain unpaid taxes . . . ” grants the IRS the power to prevent any American citizen merely alleged to owe taxes from leaving the United States. Under this agenda of financial repression, what was once “the land of the free,” figures to be the world’s largest debtor’s prison.
While it may seem obvious to you that the U.S. government is hopelessly insolvent, it is my opinion that the United States will become a full-fledged police state before it collapses, destined to be the Argentina of the twenty-first century. It won’t be pretty.
With a system so heavily tilted toward income redistribution, the pressures to close off emigration came naturally. The growth of predatory taxation and the multiplication of legal restrictions on emigration make it costly and complicated for a successful person to leave the United States. They require anyone attempting to resign U.S. citizenship to pay capital gains on appreciation of his worldwide wealth. But it gets worse. The United States could possibly continue to demand tax payments for up to a decade after you leave. And of course, if you are prohibited from leaving the U.S., you are effectively doomed to be a debt slave. Alternatively, if you try to flee, it could make it difficult for you to establish residence in a new country and qualify for citizenship there.
The growth of predatory taxation and the multiplication of legal restrictions on emigration have made it costly and complicated to join the 742 Americans leaving the United States each hour.14
The Roman Empire tried to keep taxpayers from fleeing, too. “Exit taxes” and restrictions on expatriation are modern-day analogs to the “tax reforms” of Diocletian, the Roman emperor (284–305) who wiped out what remained of the urban middle class (curiales). By the time Diocletian undertook his “reforms,” in 297, Rome was on the verge of collapse under the weight of ceaseless wars and the largest, most bureaucratic government the world had ever seen.
When Diocletian acted to raise taxes, the urban middle class was already fleeing in large numbers to escape the crushing burden of taxation. To frustrate that ambition, he made the curiales responsible for collecting taxes. If their collections fell short of the government assessment, they had to make up the difference from their own pocket, or be forced to sell their property. Many curiales tried to flee, but leaving was also against the law. It is not a coincidence that one of the most popular questions asked of soothsayers in the late Roman Empire was “should I flee?” Those who waited too long came to regret it. The middle class was financially ruined.15
It does not take a soothsayer to see that a similar fate awaits Americans with assets as financial repression escalates. While Roman taxpayers were legally prohibited from leaving, Americans are not yet chained to the fisc, but that is uncomfortably close to becoming a reality. The passage of President Obama’s highway bill will give the IRS the power to prevent any American from travelling abroad. It will become even more complicated to escape.
In particular, the requirement to hold another passport before legally quitting the U.S. tax regime makes legal expatriation a process of years rather than simply going to the ticket agent and booking a passage as it was in the late nineteenth century, when passports were not even required for most international travel.
Just as there are illegal immigrants to the United States, so there are also now growing numbers of illegal emigrants from the United States. While statistics are necessarily sketchy, evidence suggests that there has been a dramatic upsurge in the number of U.S. persons living abroad. Although it has been little reported in the media, a growing number of native-born Americans are fleeing financial repression at the hands of the Obama administration. As indicated earlier in this chapter, they have been departing at the rate of 742 per hour. According to the Association of Americans Resident Overseas, (AARO) apart from the military and other U.S. government employees, 5.08 million U.S. citizens reside abroad, about a two-thirds increase since 2008. “Among the benefits the study cites of a life abroad are statistics that show expats earn more, pay less tax, have a better work/life balance, have an improved quality of life, enjoy broader cultural opportunities, and enjoy better job prospects.”16
In the opinion of the U.S. State Department, the AARO estimate is 25 percent too low. The State Department suggests that about 1.34 million Americans have become “illegal emigrants,” which is to say, they have gone abroad and fallen off the radar.
The Association of Americans Resident Overseas suggests that there was a surge of persons leaving the United States after the onset of the Second Great Contraction in December 2007. If, indeed, it amounted to a two-thirds increase in the number of Americans living outside the United States, it marks a major inflexion point. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that agitates for tighter border controls, the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States declined to 11 million in 2008 from 12.5 million in 2007.17 For the first time since the depths of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, more persons appear to have left the United States than moved in.
Only time will tell how many of the new expatriates fall off the radar. My expectation is that quite a few will. Probably, only a small percentage left with the intention of actually renouncing U.S. citizenship. I suspect that most would prefer to simply disappear. The Obama administration seems to think so, too. That is why they are increasing financial repression, using heavy-handed tactics to make it difficult for Americans to open bank accounts outside the United States, even if they live abroad.
An element of this new repression is a requirement that all Americans file Form 8938 if they have more than $50,000 in foreign financial assets. Note that “financial assets” are defined to include “all rental property.” According to the Federal Register, “The IRS will use the information to determine whether to audit this taxpayer or transaction, including whether to impose penalties.”18 For those who are not multimillionaires, and therefore unlikely to be pursued by the IRS, the drastic step of renouncing citizenship might seem unwarranted.
Unlike the situation a century ago as British hegemony waned, there is much more visibility about what lies ahead. Today, it is not only young, low-skilled and semiskilled workers who have an incentive to get out while they still can (or not to come in the first place, as even illegal immigration has slowed as economic opportunity in the United States recedes). There is also ample reason for the older, wealthier person to emigrate.
Here the British experience is instructive. Falling relative income is associated with large out-migration. Since 1901, more people have emigrated from the UK than immigrated. By 1997, a net exodus from the UK of 15,600,000 had occurred.19 A similar exodus is destined to occur in the United States. Indeed, it may already have begun.
One of the more important investment decisions you will face in the coming years is whether you should begin to pack your bags. In my view, the U.S. economy is destined to grow slowly, or not at all, as leverage is subtracted from the system and taxes are increased to draconian levels.
You may not think of yourself this way, but if you are a U.S. citizen you are one of the “assets” of the fisc. You are not yet a complete slave as the Roman urban middle class became, but you face ruin nonetheless, as the dollar collapses and the inevitable bankruptcy of the United States looms.
The dollar will be a much smaller fraction of an ounce of gold. Look out below.
Next up, we discuss Brazil’s appeal in a post-dollar world.
1 Quoted by Harold James, The Roman Predicament: How The Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 28–29.
2 William R. Easterly, “Growth Implosions and Debt Explosions: Do Growth Slowdowns Cause Public Debt Crises?” Contributions to Macroeconomics 1, no. 1 (2001): 1.
3 Edward L. Glaeser, “Human Capital Follows the Thermometer,” New York Times, April 19, 2011.
4 Mike Shedlock, “Here’s Why the ‘Recovery’ Feels so Much Like a Depression,” Business Insider, September 29, 2010, www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-the-recovery-feels-so-much-like-a-depression-2010-9.
5 Ibid.
6 Gregory Clark, “Markets and Economic Growth: The Grain Market of Medieval England,” www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/210a/readings/market99.pdf.
7 “Historical Debt Outstanding—Annual 2000–2010,” TreasuryDirect, www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo5.htm.
8 Calculated as 13.56 − 5.807 = 7.753; 7.753 ÷ 5.807 = 133%
9 Laurence Kotlikoff, “U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don’t Even Know It,” Bloomberg News, August 10, 2010, www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-11/u-s-is-bankrupt-and-we-don-t-even-know-commentary-by-laurence-kotlikoff.html.
10 Bruce Bartlett, “How Excessive Government Killed Ancient Rome,” Cato Journal 14, no. 2 (Fall 1994).
11 Peter Garnsey, Dominic Rathbone, and Alan K. Bowman, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. XI: The High Empire, A.D. 70–192 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
12 Martin Vaughan, “Increasing Number of U.S. Expats Give Up Citizenship as IRS Gets Aggressive about Overseas Asset Reporting,” Cuenca High Life, April 7, 2010, www.cuencahighlife.com/post/2010/04/07/Increasing-number-of-US-expats-give-up-citizenship-as-IRS-gets-aggressive-with-overseas-bank-accounts.aspx.
13 “Nearly Half of US Households Escape Fed Income Tax,” CNBC.com, April 8, 2010, www.cnbc.com/id/36241249/Nearly_Half_of_US_Households_Escape_Fed_Income_Tax.
14 Bill Bonner, “Subprime State of Mind,” The Daily Reckoning, April 19, 2012, http://dailyreckoning.com/subprime-state-of-mind.
15 Lynn Harry Nelson, “The Later Roman Empire,” WWW Virtual Library, www.vlib.us/medieval/lectures/late_roman_empire.html.
16 The Association of Americans Resident Overseas, www.aaro.org.
17 Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, “Homeward Bound: Recent Immigration Enforcement and the Decline in the Illegal Alien Population,” Center for Immigration Studies, July 2008, www.cis.org/trends_and_enforcement.
18 John C. Fredenberger, “Tell the IRS What You Think of Their New Financial Report Form!,” Association of Americans Resident Overseas, http://aaro.org/component/content/article/50-fyi-taxation/296-tell-the-irs.
19 Joe Hicks and Grahame Allen, “A Century of Change: Trends in UK Statistics since 1900,” A House of Commons research paper, www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf.