Bush RAISED our taxes!

Here in Washington State, the sales-tax deduction is set to expire. (We don't have an income tax, therefore tax fairness would insist on deductibility of the sales tax.) That's a tax increase. A Republican tax increase. Let's not forget it.

Expats have a problem too:

Globalization is sending tax rates tumbling across the world, as jobs and capital migrate across borders in search of lower and more equitable taxation regimes. That makes it all the more imperative not only to roll back the recent tax increases on U.S. expatriates, but to eliminate double-taxation of overseas Americans altogether. Thankfully, there's a new bill in front of the U.S. Congress to do just that.

The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries that insists on applying an onerous system of "world-wide taxation." Since U.S. citizens living overseas are already, in most cases, paying local taxes in the countries where they work, that means they end up being taxed twice -- thus violating one of the most important principles of good tax policy. Most other countries, by contrast, have the good sense only to apply "territorial taxation," confining their taxation systems to income earned inside their national borders.

America's policy makers have tried to mitigate the adverse impact of world-wide taxation by exempting Americans living overseas from paying U.S. taxation on up to $82,400 annually. This is the "foreign-earned income exclusion" in Section 911 of the U.S. tax code. Thanks to a last-minute amendment inserted into a recent comprehensive tax bill, the foreign income exclusion will be slightly raised, but other benefits, such as housing exclusions, will be cut -- resulting in a huge spike in tax payments for many American expatriates.

The rest of the article is Heritage Foundation propaganda. And propaganda it is. If you have moneycentral.msn.com's stock screener, you can look at annualized capital investment and correlate it to profitability.

It's not pretty if you do that.