Washington – U.S. citizenship is priceless to some, worthless to others. But now the State Department has a dollar figure: U.S. citizenship is worth $450.
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At least that’s what it will cost you to renounce it.
New consular fees took effect Thursday. According to the Federal Register, the cost to process a formal renunciation of U.S. citizenship skyrocketed from $0 to $450.
The State Department doesn’t say how or why it calculated the cost. Citizenship is free for most Americans who are accorded the privilege at birth. The department says only that it “has decided that the renunciant should pay this fee at the visit during which he or she swears the oath of renunciation.”
It’s also getting more expensive if you want to keep your U.S. citizenship and need a passport to prove it. The application fee for a passport is jumping by 27 percent, from $55 to $70 with a 100 percent increase, from $20 to $40, in the passport security surcharge.
In addition to the increase in the application fee, the department will now charge $82 — up from nothing — to add new pages to a U.S. passport. It says the fee is needed to offset the cost of the pages, the time spent affixing the pages into the passport book, endorsing the passport and performing a quality-control check.
And, registering the overseas birth of an American child is going up as well. It will now cost $100 to apply for a report of a birth abroad, up from $65.
The cost of getting a document notarized at a U.S. embassy abroad is also going up. The new price is $50 for a single page, up from $30, according to the new fee schedule.
I paid this $82 fee already last month! The only benefit I got was that they did it within a few hours for no additional charge. I also think that this fee to add pages is only new when you are abroad. Overseas at an embassy, it was always free, while here there was always a charge.
Tax and tax and tax… Enough already!
If you want to lower taxes on the very wealthy you have to make up the money somewhere. That means soaking the Little People.
The whole cost of renouncing your citizenship is very strange. A Republican- and Lieberman-sponsored Bill currently oozing through Congress and the Senate would strip citizenship anyone the President decides has “supported” terrorism. No due process. No appeal. No legal standard. One wonders if the victims of this legislation will also have to pay the fee.
And if you want a proff from the irs on your incone is now up from zero to 57$
I paid $140 to the USA Department of State for a renewed passport three weeks ago. I then had to pay an additional $25 to the Post Master for processing my application, bringing the total cost to $165. It would have been a bargain to only pay $70. Where the heck is the author of this article getting information from?!