It's important to note that this is US only.
i feel the obligatory insensitive clod response to be appropriate to this post.... or is that to slashdot for hacker news?
Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
51–60 of 167 posts
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#52As a US citizen living abroad, I have no representatives. This, as I am getting ready to file my US income taxes for which I receive no benefits or representation.
Bullshit. How about maintaining the security of your assets held in US banks?
Maybe has has no assets in US banks? Just like I don't.
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#53As a US citizen living abroad, I have no representatives. This, as I am getting ready to file my US income taxes for which I receive no benefits or representation.
If you consider citizenship to be "no benefit" (you can still vote, collect Social Security, etc. overseas), you could always renounce your citizenship.
The US still charges taxes for 10 years after you renounce your citizenship if you spend more than 30 days in the country and they charge an exit tax.
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#54I'd like to see this expanded to show the full text, the representative's summary, and constituent comments for the bills, codes, policies, docket, whatever they are actually going to be voting on. Then, show how they voted.
> constituent comments for the bills
In my experience, sites that do this sort of thing usually fail. They're ghost towns, and no-one cares what an unrepresentative sample of internet people think about bills.
I'm not based in the US, but I think the other points are covered by sites like https://www.govtrack.us/. Open Congress was another, but was shut down when the Sunlight Foundation went a bit haywire.
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#55I really don't understand this. Is the point so that I can tweet or mail letters to my elected officials? Is tweeting at officials supposed to help my station in life? Just seems ridiculous to me that tweeting would be taken seriously. I suppose it could be taken seriously but that would actually scare me more. I always believed that if you want to make a difference than vote with your wallet and I don't mean to dona…
> Just seems ridiculous to me that tweeting would be taken seriously.
I would agree, though it seems that your president-elect would not..
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#56As a US citizen living abroad, I have no representatives. This, as I am getting ready to file my US income taxes for which I receive no benefits or representation.
I have a part of my family that lived in pretty unstable foreign countries, and they were more than happy of being french when problems occurred because your country will make sure you're safe, so it's a little benefit (plus having one of the best passport in the world).
But I find it strange that you don't have a "citizen abroad" representative, I don't know how many of US citizen live abroad but since, as you say it, you pay taxes you should have some representation. Here in France we have 11 representative for expatriates and I always thought it would be the same anywhere.
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#57Why does it ask for your address? Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list. Are they harvesting the address data for some reason?
Looking at the single-line input I assumed it was an email address field, not physical address. I feel so dumb.
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#58As a US citizen living abroad, I have no representatives. This, as I am getting ready to file my US income taxes for which I receive no benefits or representation.
The taxes you owe take this into account, don't they? You have benefits of being a US citizen regardless of where you live. Some may value this more than others. Weighing your options, you may want to consider changing your citizenship.
You're taxed like a resident by the US. A friend had their tax-free (in the UK) PhD stipend taxed by the US government. Other people can find themselves owing significant taxes on property sales in the UK, despite the transaction having absolutely nothing to do with the US government [1].
There are exemptions which are pretty low and clearly don't cover the above examples. Plus you still have to do the overly onerous reporting of all your bank accounts. Ultimately the winners are the accountants.
It's not justified at all by services that the US does for overseas citizens, many countries do that without needing a draconian tax system for non-resident citizens.
I think it sort of comes down to Americans believing that you must be up to something dodgy if you want to live in another country :)
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/bor...
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#59Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#60As a US citizen living abroad, I have no representatives. This, as I am getting ready to file my US income taxes for which I receive no benefits or representation.
I have a part of my family that lived in pretty unstable foreign countries, and they were more than happy of being french when problems occurred because your country will make sure you're safe, so it's a little benefit (plus having one of the best passport in the world). But I find it strange that you don't have a "citizen abroad" representative, I don't know how many of US citizen live abroad but since, as you say i…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_constituency#Current
Sadly, it's pretty rare.