Author: Mark Nestmann

Last month, lawmakers in Massachusetts approved a constitutional amendment that will lead to the departure of many of the state’s wealthiest and most productive citizens. This move is likely to cause tax revenues to drop and real estate values to collapse. The proposed change imposes a 4% surtax on residents with taxable income of $1 million or more. Currently, the state income tax rate is a flat 5.1%. So, when the measure comes into effect in 2019, the wealthiest taxpayers in Massachusetts will see their state income tax burden nearly double, which will cause many of them to move elsewhere. … Continue reading →

The post Mass Exodus? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Talk about a double standard… The US is quick to point fingers, yet hardly ever enforces its rules at home. As I write this, the US is gripped by a domestic immigration scandal that dwarfs any reproach they’ve cast on others. It’s clear the standards it demands in countries with CBI (citizenship-by-investment) programs are much stricter than those it enforces at home. In 2014, the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN warned banks that the Federation of St. Kitts & Nevis (SKN) CBI program had been hijacked by “illicit actors.” They accused the Federation of issuing passports to Iranian … Continue reading →

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I love technology. I can’t imagine life without modern conveniences like telephones, email, and the Internet. Not to mention running water, air conditioning, and automobiles. But sometimes, technology gets… well, creepy. And the creepier the technology, the more likely your friendly Big Brother will use it to keep tabs on you. A case in point is the increasing sophistication of face recognition technology. Face recognition combines digital images of faces with -software that creates a unique “faceprint” of each one, along with a database of images against which “faceprints” can be compared. A few years ago, face recognition systems were … Continue reading →

The post Even Orwell Didn’t Predict This appeared first on LewRockwell.

Your friendly Uncle Sam has done a great job of ending the civil liberties protections enshrined in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. Think of the PATRIOT Act, FATCA, and Obamacare, just to name a few examples. But individual states are running roughshod over the Constitution as well, especially in the context of the “War on (Some) Drugs.” One example is the notorious practice of civil forfeiture, where police can seize your property without accusing you, much less convicting you, of a crime. But there are many others. A case in point is Wisconsin. That state’s Supreme Court recently … Continue reading →

The post The Gov’t War on Everything appeared first on LewRockwell.

You have to admit that the US government has a pretty dismal record when it comes to computer security. In just the last year, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) revealed that hackers had stolen the personal information of more than 20 million current and former federal government applicants and employees. The stolen data included more than six million fingerprints – considered the “gold standard” for proof of identity. If that wasn’t enough, the IRS acknowledged it also had suffered a massive data breach, with hackers stealing information of more than 300,000 taxpayers to claim more than $50 million in … Continue reading →

The post Will the Feds Criminalize Real Encryption? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Imagine arriving at your local airport one morning for a domestic flight to a neighboring city. You approach the security checkpoint and the TSA lackey asks for your identification. After handing him your driver’s license, you prepare to be groped as you pass through the checkpoint. But instead, the TSA man tells you your driver’s license is no longer accepted as identification for domestic flights. He asks you for your passport. Unfortunately, you don’t have a passport. A few months ago, you received a letter from the State Department stating that since you owed the IRS money, your passport was … Continue reading →

The post Can Publicans Stop You from Flying? appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s not a popular thing to say, but the US is broke. Busted. Bankrupt. If Uncle Sam were a corporation, it would have been declared insolvent decades ago. Audited financials from the General Accountability Office prove my point. They show that official US government liabilities come to $21.5 trillion. Total assets, including federal lands, national parks, accounts receivable, and the interstate highway system total a little more than $3.2 trillion. The accounts receivable include about $1 trillion or so in student loans – more than 10% of them in default. (And yes, they’re actually listed as an “asset.”) In case … Continue reading →

The post Retirement Robbery appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s bad enough depositing your money into a bank account and earning essentially zero interest on it, or in some countries, having a negative interest rate. It’s even worse knowing that once you deposit your money in a bank, it’s not really yours anymore. You have turned over your property to the bank in return for a debt claim. You become an unsecured creditor holding an IOU. Worst of all, there’s the “bail-in,” which we all became familiar with during the 2013 banking collapse in Cyprus. Some uninsured depositors got half of their money back, although, at one bank, customers received … Continue reading →

The post Get Your Money Out of the Bank appeared first on LewRockwell.

Earlier this month, the Federal Register published its quarterly list of former US citizens and permanent residents who have “expatriated,” i.e., given up their US citizenship or permanent residence. The published data comes from the IRS, which has tracked expatriation trends since 1998. The number of people bidding adieu to the red, white, and blue for the fourth quarter of 2015 came to 1,058. For all of 2015, the total came to 4,279. This was an all-time record, beating the former record set in 2014 (3,415 expatriates) by 25%. Here’s a chart of expatriation trends since 1998, after a law … Continue reading →

The post Why They’re Getting Out appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I was nine years old, I was one of the smallest students in my fourth-grade class. With my small size, not to mention my smart mouth, I attracted more than my share of elementary school bullies. One day, two much larger boys stole my lunch box. I couldn’t fight them off, but noticed a few moments later that they were fighting each other over a handful of homemade chocolate chip cookies my mother had packed in the lunchbox. While they were distracted, I retrieved my lunchbox with everything but the cookies intact. This incident came to mind when I … Continue reading →

The post Cops Stole His House appeared first on LewRockwell.

Three weeks ago, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced that the Chinese renminbi (aka yuan) would join a group of other currencies to comprise what’s called the SDR (Special Drawing Rights) basket. This led some pundits to speculate that this step was a sign that the renminbi would inevitably replace the US dollar as the world’s “reserve currency.” Having reserve currency status is a big deal. Because the terms of the 70-year-old Bretton Woods Agreement basically made the US dollar the world’s reserve currency, the US essentially sets global monetary policy. Foreign banks, businesses, and governments have no real choice … Continue reading →

The post What Is Reserve Currency Status? appeared first on LewRockwell.

A few days ago, I was speaking to a client who informed me that “the PATRIOT Act expired last week.” She went on to tell me that as a result, she now felt her electronic communications were safe from warrantless government surveillance. My client, who I’ll call “Debby,” wasn’t correct in saying that the entire PATRIOT Act expired. It’s true that a small section of the law dealing with the bulk collection of phone records expired November 30. But I can’t blame her for believing this entire ill-conceived law no longer exists. Over the last few months, apologists for the … Continue reading →

The post No, the PATRIOT Act Didn’t Really Expire appeared first on LewRockwell.

There’s lots of scuttlebutt in the mainstream press – and beyond – about how bank secrecy is dead. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, “The rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.” To be sure, there’s an element of truth to this assertion. Thanks to laws like the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), for instance, every non-US financial institution in the world must now identify their US clients. And once they do, they must share details of those clients’ transactions with the IRS. So, it’s safe to say that if you’re a US citizen, offshore bank secrecy no longer exists … Continue reading →

The post A Big Victory for Bank Secrecy appeared first on LewRockwell.

It might sound like a conspiracy theory spun by right-wing crazies. But judging by the increasing desperation of governments to reboot the world economy, it just might happen. “It” is the recall or confiscation of cash, i.e., dollars, euros, pounds, etc., in physical form. And a key justification that those calling for this radical measure cite is that it reinforces the ability of central banks to impose negative interest rates. Negative rates mean that lenders literally pay businesses and consumers to borrow money. They also penalize savers for hoarding it. The Danish and Swiss national banks have gone the farthest … Continue reading →

The post They’re Out To Confiscate Your Cash appeared first on LewRockwell.

FATCA, officially known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, is probably the worst law that most Americans don’t know about. I’ve written about this monstrous law repeatedly, most recently here. But now, it looks as if the prospects for FATCA’s implementation could be throttled by the courts of meek and mild-mannered Canada, of all places. If you haven’t heard of FATCA, you’re not alone. US citizens living in the US who don’t invest outside the US aren’t affected by the law. But if you’re a US citizen living in another country, or one who invests outside the US, FATCA … Continue reading →