We’ll eventually get our border fence ... but we won’t like it.
Yeah, because it's designed to keep us in.
While the article is about an administrative exit fee, that's small potatoes compared to what FATCA does. It financially locks Americans into the US, unless they either renounce, or at least get a second passport.
No foreign institution even wants the accounts of Americans. It not only causes great hardship to US citizens working abroad; it is a stealth capital control that affects everyone.
If you want to renounce, you have to pay up any gains taxes (strict, but perhaps justifiable); but if you have undeclared overseas funds, or if you have declared overseas funds and make some reporting mistakes, the penalties and seizures are draconian.
When I was younger, we in the US used to point at the Nazis and the Communists as being so tyrannical that they would strip anyone exiting of their assets. I don't know how many WWII stories I read about people sewing diamonds and other valuables into their clothing; or of funds they couldn't reach either at home or in Switzerland. We were different from those countries who acted as if their governments owned their citizens' wealth... but now we are no longer. And, if that's not enough, there's always the civil asset forfeiture program.
Yeah, it’ll have one ways doors that allow entry, but no exit.