Broback's Blog

There’s been a lot of negativity of late surrounding the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. The core issue according to The Hill is:

“Now, the U.S. Treasury expects banks in every country worldwide to report funds held by “U.S. persons” (not all are U.S. citizens) beginning in 2015. If they do not, foreign financial institutions (FFIs) face huge financial penalties and sanctions.”

As Bastiat might have forecast, It’s been reported that some institutions overseas are refusing to accept U.S. clients and that has inspired a record number of Americans to renounce their citizenship.

With this in mind, I steered my browser over to Topsy.com to see what the tweets reflected. My main interest was Topsy’s sentiment metric. Comparing the term “colonoscopy” (42% negativity) to “FATCA” (53% negativity) indicates that FATCA is 26% less liked. Sadly, “Obamacare” comes in dead last with a negativity score of 78%.

More information available at wikipedia. The legislative history is shown below.