Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the "lack" of Political Will to assist if you will or to be any kind of assistance to American expats regarding taxes. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Thai Examiner that is thaiexaminer.com, the article is titled: Trump reaches out to expats in Thailand to help win the election. No double taxation pledge. 

It is worth noting, Trump talked about a lot of things with regard to taxation for expats prior to and during his first term in office, and I'm not going to get political here in my own preferences and things, but it is worth noting this was discussed before and not a lot happened. If anything, Trump Tax, which was promulgated during his term, arguably put more of an onus on Americans abroad than existed prior to the promulgation of that legislation. Do I exactly blame him per se for any of that? Not really, again it's not like he sat down and wrote up the Act himself, I mean a lot of people sort of contributed to what became the actual law. Then meanwhile, you're also talking about a situation where look at the end of the day Governments never really take less tax; it always seems to be a trend toward more. 

That being said, quoting further: "Lack of political will hinders efforts to change outdated tax laws for expats living abroad.” Yeah, I have said this for years. Expats and prisoners are the two groups of people in the American body politic that virtually have no constituency. What am I talking about here? Well and for whatever reason, expats are oftentimes just kind of overlooked. If anything we kind of get this reputation as we are all a bunch of "tax dodgers" which I don't even know what that term means, but we're all sort of running around abroad, "living the life of Riley and sort of “forget about the check, we’ll get hell to pay" to quote AC/DC, when it comes to our tax burden. That's really not the case. The vast majority of Americans that live abroad oftentimes fall under what is called the Foreign Earned Income Exemption so don't even really have tax obligation, well don't even have tax liability back to the United States; they may need to file a return but they may not owe anything. Meanwhile, again it's worth noting, I think it's really worth pointing out that yeah expats don't have a lot of voice when it comes to policy being made in the United States because again they don't really have a constituency. They're not there; they're not in the US. Again, you may be able to vote for President but depending on where your residency is for purposes of voting if you even have one in the United States, you might not even be able to vote for somebody in our Congress. 

So again it's hard to say that American expats are going to get a lot of attention from relevant political figures. Now again it's good to see that Trump is at least saying these things; I'm curious to see what Kamala Harris has to say about such matters. That said, again we've seen the first term of Trump, I'm not saying, if anything probably extending Trump Tax could probably benefit in certain ways, certain expats and certain expat type of businesses, but again was a lot done in the first term? Not a great deal. If anything, you could argue in fact that Trump Tax actually again placed a larger onus on most Americans outside of the United States. But that said, it's good to see somebody at least paying lip service to the notion of Americans not having to be so burdened by their own Tax System notwithstanding the fact they are not in their own country.