Nick Fountain

And boy, treaties are complicated.

Yeah, I did not know this before working on this story.

But Lauren, you taught me we have tax treaties with many countries.

All right.

I'm going to stop you there.

There are dozens of them.

More than 50.

And the general idea is the U.S.

is unique.

We tax our citizens' income even when they live outside of the U.S.

But we generally do not like to tax their income that has already been taxed by the country they're living in.

So we create treaties like the one with Malta, which say, among other things, if Malta has already taxed this, we won't and vice versa.

Yes.

In particular, details about how each country would tax retirement accounts.

The context here is that when the U.S.

and Malta were drafting this treaty, there was this relatively new retirement account in the U.S.

called the Roth IRA.

Roths, you might remember from the haze of trying to figure out retirement options, allow you to put your already taxed money into an account, let it grow.

And then when you reach a certain age, you can take it out tax free.

Which Andrew says is all fine and good until an American moves to some other country and that country wants to tax what's supposed to be tax-free.