Strangely, we were blessed with two straightforward and sensible takes from prominent Republican leaders on Monday. First, President Donald Trump made a full-throated defense of data centers. Next, Sen.
Page F2From§Eachthe matinee edition — 1 September 2026
Trump and Rick Scott tout 'economic sense'; American expats are still waiting on the tax reform
As it ran on the front
Filing says 'economic sense.' That's the headline over the piece from Mr. Trump and Senator Scott, ran this week in the Washington Examiner. I went and got the other filing, the one from the same general period, over at the Hill: American expats are still waiting on tax reform. Still waiting, hon. That word 'still' is doing some work in that sentence, so I checked how long 'still' has been on the books. The piece doesn't give a start date, but 'still waiting' isn't a phrase you get to use on year one.
Now, I ran the two side by side, the way you do. Column A: economic sense, offered. Column B: tax reform, the one item that would actually put money back in an expat's pocket, not delivered. I don't see a dollar figure attached to either piece — no line item, no appropriation, no vote count — which is its own kind of interesting, because usually when somebody's offering economic sense, there's a number under it somewhere. A bill. A markup. A vote scheduled. I didn't find one here. Just the word 'sense,' and the word 'waiting.'…
…(cont) I want to be careful here, because I'm not saying the two pieces are lying to each other. I'm saying if you file 'economic sense' as the header and 'still waiting' as the footer, the gap between those two things is the whole story, and it's not on me to close it — that's for whoever writes the checks, or doesn't.
Where gaps like that tend to show up, in my experience filing this stuff for a while now, is in the column marked 'later.' Reform for regular filers domestically got its vote, its markup, its schedule. Expats got a headline about sense. That's not an accusation, that's just where the two documents landed when I put them next to each other on the table.
So the reconciliation stands like this: sense, offered, no date attached. Reform, promised, no date attached either, going back further than this week's headline lets on. Two empty date columns don't cancel each other out. They just both stay open, same as they were before the headline ran.
“They call this economic sense, but the same week expats still can't get a straight answer on the double taxation they've been waiting on for years. There's always money and time for the op-ed, never for the fix that costs the party nothing to pass. That's the tell every time — when the sense is free, they've got plenty of it.”
“Tax reform for expats overseas is a complicated, multi-year process, and calling it 'economic sense' in a headline isn't really a promise, it's more of a — well, yes, that headline did say economic sense, I wrote that, that one's on us.”
The receipts
The United States is nearly alone in the world in taxing people based on citizenship rather than residence.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.