Guest Post by Simon Black
Once upon a time, long long ago in a dreamworld far far away, banks actually used to be capitalists.
They were wealth creators. They wanted to do business with their customers. They facilitated important trade and commerce. They acted responsibly and conservatively with other people’s money.
Now it’s a totally different story.
Banks seem to routinely steal from their customers. They gamble our savings away on ridiculous investment fads, treat us like criminal suspects, bury us in an absurd bureaucracy, and then charge us fees for the privilege of working with them.
And to add insult to injury, many banks seem to have become full-blown Marxists.
I started noticing this last year when a number of bank CEOs, along with heads of other major corporations like Apple and General Motors, declared that they would no longer make business decisions prioritizing what’s in the best interest of their companies’ shareholders.
Just a reminder– shareholders OWN the company. The CEO works for the company.
And yet these CEOs, who essentially work for their shareholders, have unilaterally decided that shareholders are no longer the priority.
This is a common theme in politics as well, with Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Joe Biden calling for an end to “shareholder capitalism.”
Don’t get me wrong– being a responsible corporate citizen, treating customers well, taking good care of employees, etc. are all obvious things that are beneficial for any business long-term, and hence beneficial for the shareholders.
The key issue behind this movement, however, is the belief that shareholders shouldn’t be able to call the shots any longer.
They believe the government gets a say who should / should not be on a corporate board. And the public (i.e. the Twitter mob) gets a say what a company should / should not do.
Everyone else gets to tell you what you’re allowed to do with your own private property, i.e. your shares in the company. It’s no longer up to you.
This is decidedly anti-capitalist; it’s effectively public ownership of what’s supposed to be private property. Yet banks seem perfectly willing to go along with this new ethos.
And now they have another feather in their cap:
Just a few days ago, Germany’s Deutsche Bank (one of the largest banks in the world) released a paper proposing that people who have the ‘privilege’ of working from home should have to pay a 5% tax to subsidize people who can’t.
This is a ‘work from home’ or ‘remote worker’ tax. The report claims that this tax has been needed for years, but “Covid has just made it obvious.”
So, regardless of your circumstances– even if you want to go back to the office but aren’t able to because your company sent everyone home– Deutsche Bank thinks you should have to pay up.
The report is even borderline insulting to remote workers, saying that they’re “contributing less to the infrastructure of the economy whilst still receiving its benefits.”
So apparently all of us working from home are just lazy, good-for-nothing bums in the eyes of Deutsche Bank.
This ‘research report’ seems more like something out of Communist student newspaper, not one of the world’s biggest financial institutions.
If these people feel guilty that their remote work arrangements are unjust, there’s nothing preventing them from giving their entire paychecks away.
But for whatever reason they feel entitled to demand a pound of flesh from everyone else’s paycheck too.
Yet this is the world we live in now– where even the banks have become Marxists and every idiot feels empowered to propose public policy.
And it’s also why TAX PLANNING must absolutely be part of your Plan B… which may soon become your Plan A.
This is absolutely the case if you live anywhere in the West: your taxes are going up. It’s already been happening in many cases at the local level.
In the Land of the Free, we’ve seen income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc. increase across the country.
The People’s Republic of California has even proposed a wealth tax, plus an exit tax for people who flee the state.
And that’s before considering the impact of tax increases at the national level.
The incoming presidential administration in the US has already pledged to raise taxes, including corporate profits tax, individual income tax, and capital gains tax.
It doesn’t matter that the evidence strongly opposes these decisions.
For example– over the past several decades, the US federal government’s tax revenue has consistently been about 16% to 18% of GDP, year in, year out.
In other words, the government’s ‘slice’ of the economic pie is 16-18%.
During that period, tax rates have been all over the board, from as low as 28% (for the highest individual rate) to more than 90%.
And yet the government’s slice of the pie has remained nearly constant.
The lesson here is pretty obvious: no matter how high, or low, tax rates go, the size of the slice relative to the rest of the pie remains the same.
So rather than try to make your slice bigger, why not focus your efforts (and tax policy) on what might create the biggest pie? Duh.
But hey, why bother looking at data and history before making a decision…
Another example is about capital gains tax rates; the historical data show that raising capital gains rates actually REDUCES tax revenue.
You’d think they’d take a look at the mountain of evidence first. But no. They want to increase capital gains to as high as 40%, and that’s just at the federal level.
It’s not going to be much different in many other countries, especially Europe. Governments have all their Covid programs to pay for, so they need the money.
And now it’s clear that even the banks are on board, pushing for higher taxes.
So, again, tax planning absolutely needs to be part of your Plan B. And fast.
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Lay off 25% of government workers and return the Civil Service Exam to hire the most qualified applicants. Eliminate the Social Security Disability payments for children who are Mentally, Emotionally or Behaviorally “disabled”. Start handing out seeds at a reduced price instead of free food, and homestead Federal Lands again. Sentence rioters to work gangs to repair damaged property, prepare Federal Land for homesteads, and replant forrest damaged by fire, etc.
SS disability is a huge boondoggle. If you are a junkie, you qualify for disability benefits.
Taxes aren’t about banks or banking. There WILL be a work from home tax if people continue to move out of the cities. Cities without a HUGE tax base will fail. Shame that.
FYI, I’ve been saying for years that the Great Depression was a mass migration from Rural to Urban, the Next Great Depression will be a mass migration from Urban to Rural.
Just Sayin’
You’ll still need to pack the court for that one. And pass a constitional amendment before hand.
Community credit unions, avoid big banks like the plague. Silver coins for trade, gold as a hedge vs. inflation. Fruit trees planted now are likely a better investment than 401k’s for most of us that are too young to ever see “retirement” or “social security”. I’m not a spring chicken, but no way this shit show lasts another 20yrs in any form recognizable. I’m not even optimstic anymore it stays stable beyond a couple more years, managed declines don’t seem to have many historical examples to pull from. Particularly, large empires. Carpe Diem.
Been with my local credit union for 25+ years and it was one of the smartest moves I made. Great loan rates and the money stays in the local community.
“Managed declines” I don’t believe there is such a thing.
If you could avoid the decline in the first place you wouldn’t have to “manage” the resulting circus we are now witnessing.
The populace never wants a decline, it is always at the instigation of the government, whoever it may be at the time.
The populace almost always consists of two groups:
The producers
The eaters
The producer always wants to be left alone to just do their thing.
The eater always want to take from the producers, and they use various excuses as to why they are entitled to it.
The government is retarded and listen to the eaters. The eaters will vote for the worst of humanity, and the worst of humanity has zero conscience. The government is the largest eater of all, so they have no problem with all kinds of con games, including mass election fraud, to get their way.
Eventually the eaters become loud enough and crazy enough that they call the shots.
Eventually the producers get pissed enough and stop producing.
The eaters see their quality of life erode at a rapid pace because the Big Eater (government) can no longer take enough from the producers to feed, house, clothe, etc all the eaters.
Suddenly EBT cards don’t work. Obama phones don’t work. Clean water is spotty at best. Rolling black outs happen more frequently. Medicine for the fat eaters who don’t take care of themselves is now impossible to find. Buildings the eaters live in for free start to fall apart because the producers who owned them walk away.
All the producers have moved away to live among like-minded producers. The eaters stay concentrated in urban eater areas. Now the organized gangs of eaters, with guns, patrol the streets and take what they want from other weak, unarmed eaters. Female eaters are raped. Beta male eaters are often beaten, used as forced labor, or killed. The police, long vilified by the eaters, have been reduced so much that they can barely answer the calls of the eaters, and so stop going to the calls.
The producers have organized into like minded communities where they brook no nonsense or violence. They still grow their own food, and keep the lights on. Producer people are fairly safe, and the roving band of eaters that venture out to try and steal or hurt the producers are met with force, often fatal.
Slowly but surely, many eaters start to realize that they may have been very, very wrong but no one cares what they have to say anymore because their Boy-who-cried-wolf act is so overblown it’s like background noise.
The Big Eater is now consumed with protecting itself from absolute collapse. Literally no one, at home or abroad, takes anything the Big Eater says seriously anymore. Their paper “money” is worth more in the fireplace than the corner store. It’s gold or silver Big Eater, or pound sand.
Much like the Romans who threw open the gates to the barbarian horde, it will be the starving, cold, and sick Eaters who welcome the invaders.
To say that corporations work for the shareholders is like saying government works for the people. There are a very few large shareholders who control each company and the company does their bidding. If you take the time to read the annual report, you will find that most of the directors are on the boards of 3 – 6 other corporations. They are drawing very nice salaries and have stock purchase options in each of these corporations.
A 90 year old farmer goes to the banker for a loan to buy land.
The banker has some concerns due to the old codgers age.
“What happens if you die before the loan is paid off?” The banker asks.
“I’ll send you a check from heaven, because God would want all my obligations taken care of,” The old farmer answered.
“But what if you go the other direction?” the banker queried.
“Then I’ll deliver it to you in person.”
I have been working from home for over 15 years in the same work I’m doing now. I have to file taxes at the end of the year. I have to file both federal and state taxes. So how am I not contributing “my share” to the beast?