One thing overseas Americans seem to have systematically overlooked so far, in our efforts to try to bring about changes in the current US tax legislation, is the fact that many in Washington may have their most fundamental core beliefs about taxation not based upon reason at all but elsewhere, and possibly most powerfully in the various versions of Holy Scriptures.

We have traditionally built our appeals almost entirely on the basis of facts, common sense, secular history, and so on. Perhaps we have been fundamentally deluding ourselves in terms of how the process really works today, and what the most powerful neuron motivations really are in the benighted City Upon a Hill.

If we want to have an effective impact on future deliberations in the Congress, and in the Executive Branch, too, we might be well advised to spend some time now trying to build up the metaphysical dimensions of our arguments in favor of what we think would be greater equity in the way we are being treated, and especially as justified by appropriate divine commitments.

If you Google the question: “taxation in the Bible”, as I did this morning, within 6 seconds you will have the option of viewing more than 6 million responses! Wow! Obviously a lot of folks have already been there and done that.

Three of the articles that popped up among the very first on this enormous list are below, as well as a website that has a lot of additional chatter about taxation in the Bible, provocative questions about taxing only “foreigners” and why the role of Jesus in tax issues might have contributed to his crucifixion!

So if we want to be properly prepared from now on when we meet key leaders on the Hill, we should try to get up to speed on their possible meta-fiscal sensitivities and vulnerabilities too. Yes, yes, I know that this is a very sensitive issue. But that doesn’t mean we should simply ignore it.

Here in this summary table is an overall breakdown of religious affiliations of the current members of the 112th Congress.

Now, over to you. Please share your thoughts on this new dimension of our common endeavors.

Could paying attention to this additional dimension of an already immensely complex and highly emotional issue possibly contribute productively to a quicker and more efficient game-changing resolution once and for all?

What Google gave me:

What does the Bible say about paying taxes? by Mary Fairchild, About.com

The Bible speaks on taxation (tribute) by Pastor Art Kohl, Faith Bible Baptist Church, 2002

Taxation, liberty and the Bible – Biblical tax and the various tithes by Martin G Selbrede, The Covenant News, 25 January 2009 . Martin G. Selbrede is the Vice President of the Chalcedon Foundation.

If you want to have some more fun, go to this website and read what this analyst has to say: What is taxed, which starts off with Who would Jesus tax? Data mining the Bible.

Ed. note: Andy Sundberg, founder of American Citizens Abroad and a fellow of the Overseas American Academy, occasionally contributes to this guest blog.

republished from NewGeography.com, with permission

(Video, President Obama’s announcement at the White House)

General Stanley McChrystal may be the first commanding general in the history of warfare to be relieved of his command because he groaned over the receipt of an email from an ambassador, or because one of his aides whispered to a Rolling Stone reporter that the president had looked “intimidated” in a meeting with the military brass.

In terms of carrying out strategy, it has been stated that the president had no military complaints about the heavy metal general, who was walking the impossibly thin red line between a general war in Afghanistan and a campaign waged only with assassinations and drone missiles.

Just a month before his firing, McChrystal successfully packaged a tour of the White House and Capitol Hill for President Hamid Karzai. In earlier media campaigns—notably when the president flew into Kabul in the dead of night to lecture a pajama-clad Karzi over corruption—the Afghan president was deemed unworthy of an American war effort.

However briefly, McChrystal had succeeded in integrating the Afghan government into the order of battle. So why was he sacked for humming a few bars of Satisfaction in the presence of a rock reporter?

No doubt McChrystal had his enemies within the bureaucracy, including the ubiquitous ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, former general Karl W. Eikenberry. Along with these two add in a legion of jealous Army politicos, all of whom would love to wear combat fatigues to a presidential photo-op.

In relieving General McChrystal, perhaps as part of a search for his mojo, President Obama joins a long line of presidents who never figured out how to command their commanders. Here’s a brief summary of some of the more complicated relationships between American presidents and their field generals:

President Lincoln Often praised for his habits of command in the Civil War, he nevertheless promoted, endorsed, and endured the incompetence of such generals as McClellan, Meade, Burnside, Pope, and Rosecrans before winning the war with Grant and Sherman, both of whom would horrify a Senate confirmation hearing, let alone the editors of Rolling Stone.

Grant was a drunk who killed thousands at Shiloh and Spotsylvania, and Sherman once celebrated the drowning of a boatload of reporters, pointing out that maybe their “heavy thoughts” had taken them to the bottom. He also burned Atlanta. Both understood how to win modern wars.

President Madison In the war of 1812, he had to endure generals who botched several invasions of Canada, allowed Washington to burn, and, in the case of Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, fought battles after the peace was signed. (But the Battle of New Orleans did more than Yorktown to forge American independence.)

President Kennedy He loathed his top generals, blaming them for the Bay of Pigs fiasco and for pushing him into Vietnam, saying “They always give you their bullshit about their instant reaction and split-second timing, but it never works out. No wonder it’s so hard to win a war.” Kennedy’s skepticism about the military command, however, pushed him to ignore their advice for invasion and air strikes in the Cuban Missile Crisis, possibly averting nuclear war.

Presidents Carter and Johnson In the style of the Obama White House, these two both micro-managed their war efforts. Jimmy Carter was the air traffic controller for Operation Blue Light, the failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran. Lyndon Johnson boasted that the Air Force could not hit so much as “a shithouse” in Vietnam without his authorization. Both presidencies were lost due to the foreign entanglements of the commander-in-chief.

President Roosevelt A successful example of a commander-in-chief; no president handled generals better than FDR, who was a shrewd judge of character. Roosevelt spent many months of the war in proximity to his fighting forces (including his own sons, who were serving officers). He vested authority in a number of competent commanders, starting with General George C. Marshall.

Roosevelt was clear in his strategic objectives and did not meddle, for example, in the deployment of 30,000 troops. Nor did he fire General Patton when he slapped a fatigued soldier. Imagine what General MacArthur would have said about FDR to Rolling Stone? Would FDR have cared? (Eisenhower remarked: “I spent seven years under MacArthur studying dramatics.”)

Despite all the media visibility around his decisions on Afghanistan, we know little about President Obama’s habits of military command. When he’s before large audiences, he is good at articulating the role he sees for the United States in the world. For better or worse, he is unafraid to offend traditional allies, such as Israel and Great Britain. He even sided against England in a recent flare-up around the Falkland Islands.

Strategically, however, Obama rarely contradicts his military-industrial complex. Yes, he fired McChrystal, but he replaced him with his boss, mentor, and near Siamese twin, General David Petraeus, as if to imply that the only problem in Afghanistan was McChrystal’s joke about Vice-President Biden.

While hitching his political star to the Nobel Prize for Peace, Commander-in-Chief Obama continues to fund Israel’s war footing, stations forces in Iraq, widens the commitment in Afghanistan, attacks Pakistan with drones, and pushes for war sanctions against Iran. In the pulpit, he is Woodrow Wilson; in action, he’s George W. Bush.

Nor has the Obama administration been able to articulate a coherent war aim behind the commitment of additional forces in Afghanistan. Look at the many mixed messages sent to Karzai, who depending on the week is “our man” or the next Diem.

The president’s current directive to his generals is to avoid casualties, hold a mountainous country the size of Texas with eight divisions, foster rural development in places like Helmand, find bin Laden, pacify the federal tribal areas, make President Karzai look democratic, train the Afghan army and police, leer across the border at Iran, and prop up a wobbly government in Pakistan. Although, politically speaking, all the administration wants is enough shock and awe so that the Republicans in the 2010 mid-term elections cannot paint it as “weak on terror” or having “lost” Afghanistan.

In turning the strategic decisions about Afghanistan into an endless university teach-in (with all the allusions to “accountability”, “transitions”, and “benchmarks”), the president acts as if all the timing questions in this war were on his side. Let’s hope that the Taliban and other insurgents, especially those now planting car bombs in Islamabad, Baghdad, and Kabul, got the departmental memo that the United States would be on sabbatical in 2011.

In 1815, Andrew Jackson felt he had to attack the British the very night he heard they had landed near New Orleans. By contrast, President Obama spent a leisurely year pondering the Weltanschauung of Afghanistan and publicly ruminating about strategic options. He now feels he can afford the luxury of sacking a field general for failing to sound reverential in an interview. Aren’t there better measures of a commander? (At Bellow Wood, a Marine officer said: “Retreat? Hell, we just got here.”)

Before Lincoln could become the wartime president that we admire, he needed to find a general “who fights”, and he needed to articulate an acceptable and collective war aim, which he achieved with his Gettysburg address and Second Inaugural. He also had to come to the conclusion that Grant, drunk, made more sense than his other generals sober.

Ed. note: Matthew Stevenson, who lives in Switzerland, is a Fellow of the Overseas American Academy in Geneva, Switzerland, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited (available at Off the Shelf in Geneva), winner of Foreword’s bronze award for best travel essays at this year’s BEA. He is also editor of Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine.

Andy Sundberg is a committee member of American Citizens Abroad (ACA), which is based in Geneva, Switzerland

Background: “US, Switzerland ‘initial’ revised double taxation agreement”, 19 June 2009, GenevaLunch

There is, alas, much more to this story than what has appeared in print so far.

When ACA first learned about these negotiations, a few weeks ago, we asked the U.S. Embassy staff in Bern to help us arrange a meeting with the U.S. Delegation from Washington that would be coming to negotiate with the Swiss Government in Bern.  All of their attempts were rebuffed.

We then asked members of the U.S. Embassy staff in Bern to please transmit our written requests to the team. What we hoped to see happen was for this revised agreement with Switzerland to include provisions that were already contained in some other recently revised double taxation agreements with other countries. We had learned that such provisions were supposed to become standard components of all future double taxation treaty revisions.

Most notable in our request was for the United States and Switzerland agree to stop taxing the social security pensions that each country gives to citizens of the other country.  This provision was recently incorporated in the revised treaty between the United States and the UK, and also in the revised treaty with France.

We also asked for several other changes because, as you know, the Swiss Government does not tax Swiss citizens living in the United States, and so what we were seeking was a treaty that would come closer to parity in both directions.

All of our requests were ignored by the visiting delegation from Washington.

We never had a chance to meet or even talk with the U.S. negotiators.  They apparently had only one objective in mind which was to get an agreement to enhance the sharing of information on bank accounts as soon as possible.

This attitude of the U.S. negotiating team stunned us.  Why?

President Obama had made several promises to overseas Americans during his campaign last year, and we believed him.  He said then that:

• he wanted us to be able to get back to a more level worldwide playing field,
• he wanted to establish an on-going dialog with us, and
• he would work to ensure that we could become more active participants as partners with our home country.

All of that fine talk is going nowhere right now.

We are deeply disappointed that we were so rudely ignored on this important and symbolically unique occasion. It would have been very easy for the U.S. negotiating team to have at least granted us a few moments to talk to them in Bern and to share some of our suggestions with them.

But the answer was simply No.

Their total refusal to have any contact with us is not a good harbinger of things to come.  And with all of the dire threats that are now being voiced by the head of the IRS, and even by the President himself, it looks very likely that things could become much more grim and ugly for overseas Americans in the weeks and months to come.

Why do we deserve this?  And more importantly, how is this helping the United States?

If you think this is unacceptable, please send a letter to President Obama right away and share your concerns with him.  There seems to be no other way of communicating with this new Administration right now.

Andy Sundberg is a long-term US resident overseas and founder and director of several overseas American organizations

Given the preeminent role that the United States plays, and wants to keep playing, in world trade, what we do and how we try to do it can have enormous consequences for all of us.

But in a world in which raw materials and manufactured components are moving across borders at a record pace, and worldwide sourcing is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, what does the concept of “Buy American” really mean anymore?  Paradoxically, it might just make “Selling American” much more difficult.

Imagine also, for a moment, that the U.S. Government actually started to see the wisdom of regularly talking to private sector overseas Americans too, to try to get a better feel for what is actually happening on the ground all over the world.  This is not the realm of diplomats but of the practical day to day life of tough and creative decision-makers in myriad markets scattered all across our planet.

Sounds utopian today, doesn’t it, but who knows, maybe we as a nation might finally grow up and open our eyes and ears to learn some useful lessons from this freely available source of priceless knowledge and hard earned experience.

Such is the common wisdom and practice of a growing number of other countries who have already integrated their diasporas into their strategic planning and national promotion.

The following stories in the Financial Times address some of these themes.  They have enormous implications not only for folks back home but also for U.S. citizens living and working abroad.

• “Obama Urged To Curb Buy American Measures,” FT, 25 May 2009
• “Initiative backfires for US companies,” FT, 25 May 2009
• “US free trade promises must be honoured,” FT, 19 May 2009
• “Not so free trade,” FT, 24 March 2009

Andy Sundberg is a long-term US resident overseas and founder and director of several overseas American organizations

If you read the speech that President Barack Obama addressed to the Congress (Ed. note: video at the end of this post) yesterday, it will take a bit of an effort to try to find any mention of Americans who live and work abroad. But there are some and I have highlighted a couple of these for you.

Okay, okay, we are only about 4 million, or just a bit over 1% of the total U.S. population, so we should exercise our long familiar self-restraint and humility in any such quest.  And, of course we also have to accept the sad fact that we have long been ignored or even suspected of perfidy for having chosen to live away from our home country.  But, at least from our own perspective, many of us actually do believe that we fill a rather unique and very positive role in our nation’s and the entire world’s economy, so our curiosity as to where we might fit into the latest initiatives of our new government are certainly legitimate.

Some might have assumed that there would be at least a minimal recognition and encouragement to those of us on the front lines of our country’s private sector interface with the other peoples of the world.  Alas, nada.  Or almost.

What was mentioned, in keeping with a standard mantra of the last four decades, is the following:

“We will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.”

WOW. But that is not only silly but also dangerous.  In almost all cases this was never the principal reason for U.S. companies to invest abroad.  They do so to compete directly on the ground to open up world markets so that exports of finished U.S. products and services as well as raw materials and fabricated components from U.S. origins can also play an important role in these markets.

And just pause for a moment to think of all the foreign investment in production facilities in the United States.  Should foreign governments now also seek to emulate our bizarre attitude and impose heavy tax penalties on their overseas entities and investors too to indulge in this unique U.S. proclivity to vigorously tip the level playing field against its own citizens?   Has anyone in Washington ever sought to understand the rules of the trade game in the world today, or even talk about them with its own citizens who live and work abroad?  If not, why not?

So such condemnations of alleged tax breaks are not indications of sound new policy choices at all but instead just more manifestations of the curious but classic American dislike for having to face up to the realities of competition in world markets and what it takes to survive in the face of ever changing strategies and legal and financial obstacles that define this world marketplace.

On the other hand the promises that the President made in the following statement should also be kept carefully in mind too as you fill out your overseas American tax return this year:

“In order to save our children from a future of debt, we will also end the tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% of Americans.

But let me perfectly clear, because I know you’ll hear the same old claims that rolling back these tax breaks means a massive tax increase on the American people: if your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime. In fact, the recovery plan provides a tax cut – that’s right, a tax cut – for 95% of working families. And these checks are on the way.”

So checks soon in our mailboxes too?  Maybe, in which case a hearty Hip Hip Hoorah after all.  But also make sure your tax advisor is aware of this vibrant and enthusiastic Presidential promise. This could turn out to be a very interesting year indeed!

Video from the White House, President Obama’s speech (Adobe 10 needed to view: (download) allow streaming time to load)

So why are Bhutanese so
happy?

Professor White suggests that Bhutan’s strong national identity, their beautiful scenery and intact culture explains their
high level of happiness.

Bhutan’s national identity is fiercely protected by the government, which is famous for
it’s Gross National Happiness policy.

Bhutan strictly enforces annual
limits to the number of tourists who can visit. In 2007, about 21,000 tourists
entered the Kingdom and the government sees little reason to increase this
number. The stated reason for this, according to a  tourist website is to “avoid the negative impacts of
tourism on the culture and the environment.” Tourists need to be on a guided
tour for the duration of their visit.

The tiny kingdom, about the size of Switzerland is surrounded by the beautiful Himalayan mountains which both isolates and protects it from the outside world and makes travel difficult at best. Television and
internet was only allowed throughout the country starting in 1999 and is government controlled. Television program are allowed based on what increases a person’s happiness. The government recently decided that watching MTV and World Wide Wrestling do not make people happier so they were taken off the air.

Buddhism has been the dominant religion in Bhutan since the 7th century. The Bhutan Tourism Corporation Ltd.
website states that Buddhism “has inculcated deeply the value that all forms of
sentient life, not just human life, are precious and sacred.” This statement
conflicts drastically with the government’s expulsion of over 100,000
Nepali-speaking Lhotshampas in the early 1990’s. The Lhotshampas practice the
Hindu religion. The 1988 census revealed that the Nepali’s constituted 45% of
the population  in Bhutan,
threatening to become the majority. The Lhotshampas have been exiled in Nepal and
confined into seven refugee camps for the past 15 years. A detailed history of
their situation is found on the UNHCR site.

Hindus are not the only devalued religious group in Bhutan. Bhutan4Christ is a website
which details the struggles that Christians have experienced in Bhutan.

Yesterday the BBC reported that the first group of
Bhutanese refugees were being resettled in the US and New Zealand.

Perhaps they will find freedom to practice the religion of their choice in
these countries.

After 15 years in a refugee camp, perhaps they will finally find
happiness.