Wipe all income taxes - and let people work and feed their families

All taxation is not theft.

It's how we pool our resources to pay for shared infrastructure. Theft is (morally, technically, legally) when someone uses this shared infrastructure without paying their share of tax.

You've been persuaded by a ruling class, that tax is 'the problem'. Tax is not the problem. Rent-seeking is the problem - particularly with regard real-estate. That is the thing that's killing our economies, our future, us.

As it happens, by instituting a land-value-tax, we could (probably) wipe out income-tax. You are approaching this from the wrong direction, with the wrong morality though.

Oh yea - and calling our government "socialist/communist" is just fucking stupid - you've outed yourself as being a proto-facsist libertarian conspiracy-theorist crank - and this is the last of my attention that you're going to get.

Bye

I hope this discussion goes nowhere. Income tax is one of the few ways of reducing the income disparity between the very rich and the very poor.
You say that if the rich paid no income tax the money could then be spent on "more office space" but if they do pay income tax the money can be spent on roads, health and education . Which is most important? Your philosophy is extreme right wing and I think you are in the wrong party.

If you check out the Value-based Economy discussion, you will see that in a VBE there is no tax whatsoever. This type of economy works on very different principles from our current system. It's way too much to cover yet AGAIN here, but a lot was said in the discussion on the topic. Suffice it to say, YOU CAN have an economy where there are no taxes, there is no inflation/deflation, and there is enough currency to do WHATEVER the societal group wants to do...even massively huge projects that cost billions. Anyhow, that is the very high elevator pitch...you have to see the details to see how it works.

I agree with the sentiment of what @chohenglass has said here.

However, I believe that the problem of taxation is not the real problem. I do believe that we need to remove income taxes, but what we really must change is the defective monetary system by having the Government create and supply its own money and thereby removing the need to tax the income of the workers.

I am very interested to see what @kennethkopelson has written in his white paper on the subject.

In my opinion, the very basics of the problem is that all the money in circulation comes only from private banking corporations (97% of our money is ledger money, only 3% is physical (I'd need to verify that statement, but I think its about right)).

All the money in circulation is created by the banks, in the form of debts. All the money in circulation is a loan, that must be returned to the bank, increased with the interest. The banker creates money and lends it, but he has the borrower's pledge to bring all this money back, plus other money that he did not create (interest). The banker demands the borrower to pay him back, in addition to the principal he created, the interest he did not create, and that no one did create. As it is impossible to pay back money that does not exist, one must borrow again, or get the extra money from someone else (through sales of good and services etc). This extra money that he gets was also created by the banks in the same manner, a loan, that must be returned to the bank, increased with the interest. The second person has the same problem as the first, he must pay back more money than he was loaned, so he must get the extra money from someone else (through sales of good and services etc) or additional loans and so debts pile up.

This is an inherently defective monetary system.

This is what happens in all the countries in the world.

Back to taxes.

What are taxes used for?
-Servicing of National Debt
-Health Services
-Education Institutions
-Nature Conservation Departments
-Town and City Councils/municipalities
-Public Libraries
-Public Parks
-Policing Services
-Defence Force Services
-Correctional Services
-Traffic Departments
-Social Welfare Services
-Housing & Development
-Remuneration of Civil Servants (Ministers of Parliament etc)

These are just a few of the things our taxes are used for. I think the biggest are Servicing Debt, Health care, Education and Welfare.

One way of paying for all of these services would be for the Government to borrow money from the IMF etc. They could do away with all taxes and use this borrowed money to finance these services. But of course that would be horrendously expensive and would bankrupt the country in a very short amount of time.

Question: Does the Government have the power to create money interest and debt-free? Would this money be as good as that of the banks?

Answer: The Government has indeed the power to create and issue the money of our country and it would be just as good as (actually better than) the banks.

The reason that it is just as good as bank created money is that it is not the bankers who give money its value; it is the production of the country that give money its value.

Money itself IS NOT wealth. Money is not an earthly good capable of satisfying a temporal need.
-You cannot keep yourself alive by eating money.
-To get dressed, you cannot sew together 10 dollar notes to make a dress or a pair of pants.
-You cannot rest by lying down on money.
-You cannot cure a sickness by putting money on the cause of the sickness.
-You cannot educate yourself by putting money on your head.

Money is not real wealth. Real wealth consists of all the useful things which satisfy human needs.
-Bread, meat, fish, cotton, wood, coal, oil, a car on a good road, a doctor visiting the sick, the knowledge of a scientist — these are real wealth.

But, in our modern world, each individual does not produce all the things. People must buy from one another. Money is the symbol or token that one gets in return for a thing sold; it is the symbol that one must give in return for a thing that one wants from another.

Wealth is the thing; money is the symbol of that thing. The symbol should reflect the thing.

Bankers produce absolutely nothing; they only create the figures that allow the nation to make use of its own producing capacity, its own wealth.

Without the production of all the citizens in the country, the figures of the bankers are worthless.

So, the Government can just as well create these figures itself, without going through the banks, and without getting into debt. Then why should the Government pay interest to a private banking system for the use of its money, when it could issue it itself, without going through the banks, without interest nor debt?

For the Government to refuse to itself a privilege it has granted to the banks, is the height of imbecility! Moreover, it is actually the first duty of any sovereign government to issue its own currency, but all the countries today have unjustly given up this power to private corporations, the chartered banks.

Now, will you tell me why a government with the power to create interest and debt-free money should give that power away to a private monopoly and then borrow that which parliament can create itself, back at interest, to the point of national bankruptcy?

In relation to taxes, if the government has the ability to create this interest and debt-free money, then they can create this money to fund these services that are currently tax funded, thereby removing the need for the government to tax our incomes.

Hence, taxes are not the root problem, but rather a symptom of an inherently flawed monetary system.

@nicktaylor1 ad hominem attacks are unhelpful and only a socialist/communist would react so violently to what he suspects to be fascist tenancies.

New Zealand may not be a socialist country, but the welfare system in the country is very wide ranging, offering support for housing, unemployment, health, child care, and education as well. Therefore, New Zealand has many of the characteristics of a socialist country.

@kennethkopelson @nicktaylor1 @dennisdorney @cohenglass

https://www.loomio.org/d/BZrSyxNo/supporting-a-new-value-based-economy?proposal=JCAfqLSX

@dennisdorney I think that disparity between rich and poor is again not the real problem.

The problem for the "have nots" is chronic shortage of purchasing power and this links back into the monetary supply system.

Rather than communising the wealth of the rich we should look at other solutions.

I believe that to solve the problem of the disparity between rich and poor, it is clear that the government must take back their prerogative of the creation of money, and exercise themselves the control over the volume of money required for the population;
a.) Base the money on the productive capacity of the country;
b.) Issue new money, no longer as an interest-bearing debt to the bankers, but debt-free;
c.) Give a "Basic Living Income" or a "National Dividend" to each citizen.

Don't confuse the "BLI" or the "ND" with the dole or with welfare. The BLI/ND is not public charity, but a distribution of income to the members of society.

@wadevuglar I agree with most of what you say . Most of it is straight Social Credit philosophy or Positivemoney theory which has become respectable recently. It is possible that the @kennethkopelson value based idea might work but I am not interested in supporting it because it is obvious that recent comments by Martin Wolf of the Financial Times have been lifted straight from the "Modernising Money" book , which is the bible of Positive Money.
He is not alone, so the philosophy has support from mainstream economists, which is not the case for Kenneth's views, as far as I know, and it would be crazy to go into an election campaign with an untested economic platform.

@dennisdorney Please keep in mind that the current crop of economists, the ones you are wanting to refer to as "experts" are the very same people who gave us our current system, which is anything but sustainable and empowering for all humanity. PositiveMoney is just a few changes to the same basic system, and will not result in any true revolutionary changes. Also, the concepts presented there are not tested either. Various aspects of my concepts, however, have been tested throughout history. Generally, PositiveMoney just doesn't go far enough to do anything really. Please read this article to get an idea of what I'm talking about:

http://www.ukcolumn.org/article/problem-positive-money

Value-based Economy, on the other hand, makes REAL changes that just make sense. There would be no more taxes, all the money necessary for all humans to have realistic opportunity to flourish, and all the benefits afforded by a mixed-economy system.

@dennisdorney Yes, it is pure Social Credit. I am not a financial expert at all, but from what I have read on both Social Credit and Positive Money (which I do like), it seems to me the the Social Credit proposals are more well rounded and go further in changing the monetary system.

@kennethkopelson The link that you suggest I read is nionsense. It has cherry picked a few of PositiveMoney's solutions and misrepresented them. It is deliberate propaganda. It cant even distinguish between currency and electronic money.
I have read "Modernising Money", the book that puts the detail into Positive Money's proposals, right through. Have you? It answers all of the pseudo-arguments in your link. The fact that your link has taken the trouble to rfespond with spurious arguments means that they are worried. The usual response is to ignore the enemy.
It is true that PositiveMoney's ideas have not been tried out, but apart from the detail, there is not much difference between their idea and Social Credit's which has been tried out successfully in 1935 when the Labour Government used it to fund their very successful State Housing project - something that Labour should be proposing right now, incidentally.
I have heard that the Australian Govt used a very similar scheme to fund its WW1 commitment without recourse to external borrowing. And one of the Channel Islands used a simple version in the 19th C when it was faced with bankruptcy.
Its a bit cute to suggest that we should ignore the 'experts' because it was they that got us into this mess. Surely if they are prepared to changed their thinking that ought to produce a different and better result?
It is also naive to claim that the new system would change virtually nothing. Do you understand that the present system allows the banks to create 98% of our money supply as interest bearing debt and the proposed system will allow the State to produce 100% of our money supply free from interest and debt? How different can that be?

was also used on a small scale in the 1850