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I know, from news here in Canada, that they have introduce some delays that are preventing thousands of dual citizens to renounce their US citizenships until 2015 at the earliest. Furthermore, you can not renounce your US citizenship if do not have citizenship in another country. So, of course, most Americans can not do this and to use the population of the US as a relative base for your count is meaningless.

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Good point. According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_diaspora) there are 6.3 million Americans living abroad or ~2% of Americans. So perhaps ~0.04% of Americans abroad renounced citizenship annually. To put it in context, though, you'd need to know how that rate change over time and the size of the American diaspora over time.

So it's hard to judge how big or meaningful this story is. But anecdotally, I too am in Canada and I have definitely been hearing a lot recently from American friends who are finding US citizenship to be a PITA because of taxes.

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