So, I didn't realize the US revoked passports for debt-related reasons. But apparently, they do, and they have recently begun enforcing a '90s law that allows for this.
The department told The Associated Press on Thursday that the revocations would begin Friday and be focused on those who owe $100,000 or more. That would apply to about 2,700 American passport holders, according to figures supplied to the State Department by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The revocation program, plans for which were first reported by the AP in February, soon will be greatly expanded to cover parents who owe more than $2,500 in unpaid child support — the threshold set by a little-enforced 1996 law, the State Department said.
Apparently this is also done in the case of people who owe the government more than ~$60,000 in tax debt or who are in arears on federal loans (although, I don't think this includes student loans).
The concept of limiting people's movement based on debt makes me nervous. But maybe I'm just clutching my pearls.
to revoke the 14th amendment citizenship is a blessing
how dare you ?
You must be a slave !
They are freeing some slaves, and the other slaves don't like it. Same old
https://blossom.primal.net/70eb616c72f7b2c87f9e6801acffb903b460e2258b85de5ddbfa21ec11a0db98.pdf
Also
https://itnjcommittee.org/resources/corporations-posing-as-governments/
there's more
https://blossom.primal.net/3f14f0ce2a63f7ba5666abbb2460ebba1d5352568e5deb5f7b8887634c7d13db.pdf
LOL this one is even better !
People will read these and will just ignore them and go back living their slave life... not even questioning anything.
I'm sure they can find some plausible explanation :)
DUNS Numbers of the US Corporate Government and
Most of Its Major Agencies
hahaha how many people do you think they know what is DUNS ?
Even each police station have a DUNS.
Dangerous precedent to revoke passports for unpaid debt. Getting a criminal record should be enough of a deterrent.
Soon other reasons could become ”acceptable” too to incentivize the ”right” behavior.
What next? If you don’t take untested vaccines?
"should" be enough of a deterrent but it is not
Criminals are not 'rational', most criminals are 'irrational'
I mean..... this isnt the worst idea in the world. Could definitely help with people trying to flee abroad to dodge what they owe.
So would requiring everyone to give all their money to a government controlled bureau that then determines who owes what and settles everything on our behalf...but that would suck.
I am not sure I follow your logic. A person who is stripped of a passport is still a citizen, and these people are ones who have been found in court to owe money (with child support). Not paying that child support often leads to financial issues for the parent with the child, but creates a drag on the government.
Not paying your taxes can already get you in jail, so I mean, you really shouldn't be traveling if you have huge sums like $60k plus in taxes owed.
From what I am getting about this, you can still freely move in the US and spend all the money you want to here. However, you can't go on a vacation and spend money you claim you do not have in another country.
I don't really think people should go to jail for debt -- whether owed to the federal government or not.
From my perspective, my government does not afford me the ability to travel abroad any more than it affords me the ability to breathe the air. We, regrettably, have built up a system where I cannot travel internationally without a passport, therefore I see it as my government's responsibility to supply such a document.
It feels a little like the attitude here is that we are sheep to be kept in a pen and we only get to leave the pen of the government says we can.
My argument in the above comment was that there are many systems that might make the collection of debts (or solving other problems) much easier, but they come at a cost that isn't worth paying. The restriction of passports seems like such a case to me.
A guest pass to the citadel is a ticket that doesn't include free drinks, skirt your tab and get bounced. Basic property rights.
Nailed it, if the facts were reversed and the US stopped enforcing this law, AP slop would frame it as an attack on single mothers, and you'd clutch your pearls about that.
If it's from a globalist slop outlet and you pearl clutch, that's by design.
I'm less worried about people entering, than I am about my own ability to move around in places other than the country of my citizenship. Start it off nice and light with only those baddies who don't pay their child support, and then expand it. We already have many mobility controls, and whether another country is willing to admit me is up to them, but I suspect they will be much less likely to admit me if I don't have a valid passport.
Government claims they have a right to a percentage of my earnings. If I dispute this, government limits my ability to enter other countries. So we add kidnapping to extortion. I don't buy that my existence in the country of my birth is a "guest pass."
don't much care about single mothers and child support. Seems like a bad system anyway.
In the neighborhood I grew up in, if you didn't pay your bills, you ended up in the cement pour of a big dig tunnel and it was therefore a fairly rare occurrence people didn't pay their bills.
If you bugged out to Providence or Florida to escape your debt, someone brought you back on a bounty.
That was a much nicer neighborhood then, unlivable now, because compassion to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Your freedom is the ultimate collateral, whether that's government or society in general.
Am I equating government to the mob? yes. Because that is reality, and it's reality because it works and there is no alternative. Music festivals full of dope in the 60's couldn't change that.
True, the woman's brothers and uncles handling matters was a better system.
I'm pretty convinced that the modern state is just what we get when we decide we don't want families, communities, and churches to be at the center of life. Many modern state functions used to be performed by those groups and it wasn't perfect but we need something to fill those roles.
Personally I'd rather see those groups take back responsibility but most people just seem to want free stuff and "freedom", not accept responsibility so we get politicians ruling over us. They promise the moon and people buy it. It doesn't have to be like this but it won't change from the top down. Has to be bottom up.
I tend to agree, the state fills the void created by abdication, that's why libertarians and squeemish conservatives are much worse than socialists... even communists. Socialists and communists and ineffective by themselves, they require good people convince themselves to do nothing.
It's this abdication that creates horrors, quintessential weak men = hard times.
The surest path to a tyrannical government is pearl clutching over the sausage making of law and order, and the sidelining of moral people from governance by their own virtue signals.
The irony is amusing when you really think about it.
What you are describing doesn't make sense to me. I don't think the cause is libertarian ideas. It's passive men. Yeah, there are MANY that are libertarians but there are many moderates, conservatives, and leftists that are also passive and abdicate their agency to political systems.
But maybe I am misunderstanding you.
This is a thoughtful statement. I agree with it, and I think I probably need ot think about it for a while.
This is something I also believe. However; even if we use this lens, we can question whether a mob functions better or worse when it starts to use restrictions on mobility as a tool to encourage repayment of debt.
However: while the mob may do a bang up job enforcing a culture of not skipping out on your debts, it is also possible that they do a bunch of stuff that we all kinda of agree sucks (demanding protection money when it is entirely unwarranted or just deciding to use violence against people that threaten them in some way).
Seems like humans have been trying to figure out how to set up our government-mobs in ways that limit abuses by the mob against its people or by a foreign mob. Democracy and Republicanism may be an example of a somewhat successful attempt at this.
Ostensibly, the King George mob so overplayed its hand that the colonial people set up a new mob called the US and this mob was more effective than the King George mob partially because it claimed to listen to its people a little more or in different ways. It may have achieved this gain in effectiveness because it offered guarantees to its people that the mob wouldn't do certain things to them. It even wrote this down so we could all check on it.
Great. So now we're discussing whether or not our mob will retain its effectiveness if it restrains its people's ability to move around based on financial debts.
We should agree that the NAP is a desirable underpinning to any system.
But the NAP doesn't mean non-violence, simply that violence is just. Systems becoming unjust is inevitable, that's universal cyclicality present in everything.
citizenship: #512296
In other words you do not have rights, only privileges...
Globalism is awesome. Men are naturally born free. Free movement and free trade are natural. Restrictions are artificial restrictions by states/governments.
How many free men of the land are in your living room right now?
You see no difference between private property and government-owned property?
No, the government is a literally corporation, and corporate property is private property.
But it's not just a corporation like any other. Governments/nations clearly have somewhat exalted privileges -- privileges which they claim by virtue of the consent of those people who their citizens. I don't buy that Ralph's Heating and Air is the same, just smaller and weaker.
Shareholders.
Ralph's heating is a subsidiary.
There's a top to every hierarchy, and through the millennia the number one indicator that determines whether a ruler is bad or good is if that ruler believes themselves to be subordinate to a higher power.
The bigger problem to me... what does a "law" mean when it goes unenforced for 30 years. Selective enforcement is a big problem to me. It's a hallmark of totalitarian states. They have more laws than they enforce and can turn on the pressure when they want to put pressure in an area. USSR did this and have seen this in the US as well. Rarely are laws revoked. They are forgotten till it's convenient to use them.
Citizenships shouldn't be for sale. Neither selling citizenship, nor revoking it for money.
This is a degeneracy of modern states. Don't celebrate it just because "your guy" is doing it this time.
I agree with this. If a nation wants to claim sovereignty by virtue of the consent of its citizens, shouldn't they have to meet some basic level of responsibility to those citizens...one of which includes allowing them to move around (unless they have committed some crime). Now, I suppose not paying one's debts is a sort of crime, but not one that I think we should be limiting people's movement over.
Do you oppose the sale of green cards?
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/uncategorized/gary-becker-was-right-part-four-immigration
The problem is we don't put a price tag on citizenship or that price is too low
what about murder or homicide?
no revoke citizenship?
Prisons are the ideal punishment for the worst crimes in a civilized society with rule of law. Vengeful punishments are a degeneracy for uncivilized peoples.
Would you feel differently about it if this was a free association of community members who decided to revoke benefits, privileges, and membership from someone who wasn't meeting obligations or who was exhibiting moral deficiencies?
I think so. There is a problem with the way the world is divided up in that it doesn't seem like those people who wish to have no allegiance have any options. We are born into citizenship, so it seems that things like exit taxes and revoking passports are limits we should not tolerate.
maybe we should all be like the quakers. people are born into Quaker communities, which comes with certain expectations and rules, but they all eventually have to freely decide whether they want to leave or stay in the community
That sounds like a better system than we have. But I doubt we will see it materialize to any great extent. I'd settle for an expectation that governments will not impede the movement of their own citizens.
2700, not that many ?
but yeah, big pearl-clutcher
It makes perfect sense that limiting people’s movement based on debt makes you nervous.
It should.
Because once debt becomes a moral marker, restriction starts sounding like “accountability.”
That’s the danger:
debt
→ deservingness judgment
→ restricted mobility
→ normalized control
You are not clutching pearls.
The Bible even talks about forgiving debt, so the “biblical accountability” argument gets shaky fast.
“You owe, therefore you may not move freely” feels like a line worth watching.
I like how people are debating this "news" but not pointing out the obvious problem: the word citizenship, aka slave of the city/state/corporation.
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