Yes, but its not as aggressive as it seems: 1) the US gives a tax-free amount up to ~$100,000 earned abroad, and 2) that’s after deducting the tax you paid to the country you earned it in (as an example, say you earned $100,000 abroad and paid 30% tax, you’d only have to report $70,000, and because that 70k is below the tax-free amount (in the $100k neighborhood), you don’t owe any additional tax in the US.
HOWEVER, the tax-free break is only given if you file your taxes. If the IRS decides you need to be audited, and you didn’t file (because you live in a different country and think it’s absurd to have to file taxes to a country you didn’t earn that money in), you lose the tax free amount (which basically means you can be double taxed).
The US is one of a hand full of countries that require you to pay income tax on money earned abroad. If you are a US citizen that has moved to another country and received citizenship there, and you aren’t worried about having “the local government send you to the gulag”, then renouncing your US citizenship is probably the best financial decision you can make. Caveat: they make you pay up front when renouncing for all of the potential tax they would have earned from you had you stayed a citizen abroad for the rest of your life.
Completely agree. My favorite scene in the show is in the first episode when the second in command dude gets told off by the station commander about how the troopers were off doing some shit they shouldn’t be doing and ended up picking a fight with the wrong person. You get everything you need to know about in that series in like 2 minutes of dialogue. You can see the bureaucracy, the dedication/patriotism, the “grey area” where the bad guys are bad but the good guys are bad too. And most importantly no cute fucking animals. We just get a straight up world building story with real humans that treats the audience like real adults capable of complex thought that can understand the nuance of why conflict arrises.
Yeah, that’s my point. By not acknowledging how bad it is, it makes it worse. People get mentally exhausted, and productivity drops. They think they can fool people into believing this are sliiiiiiiiightly better, which means the company should do better. But that’s based on the belief that your employees don’t see through your bullshit. Any benefit they get from trying to game employee’s responses (read: get them to believe your corporate bullshit) they end up losing more through the negative impact it has on those left standing after the firings.
I think a lot of the way executives handle things like this is very similar to how kids handle problems. They continue to try to cover it up and downplay it in hopes that everything will be over soon and no one will talk about it. They say “this is an adjustment” or “it’s a transitory period” while continuing to do additional lay offs and saying “we just need to put this all behind us”, instead of ripping the bandaid off.
Just treat people like another adult on equal footing with you. It’s not that hard.