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LOWER TAXES
Your taxes would be much lower if we taxed payments instead of income
Collectively, we earn $22 trillion per year.
There are $9,184 trillion in payments each year.
Taxing Income
We would have to tax our income at a rate of 39% just to balance today's budget.
$8.5 trillion
÷ $22 trillion
39%
The federal budget and every state and local government budget totals $8.5 trillion.
Taxing Payments
If we taxed payments at a rate of 0.25% it would generate $23 trillion.
$23 trillion
÷ 9,184 trillion
0.25%
That covers today's budget, plus basic income, child care, free healthcare, and free college.
We're simply taxing the wrong thing!
The rising tide of payments in the monetary economy exceeds both the GDP and our collective income by over 400-times.
We are taxing the red sphere when we should be taxing the blue sphere!
The blue sphere represents the total volume of payments in the economy, as detailed in the table below.
The red sphere represents our collective income.
The volume of payments from trading financial assets eclipses the rest of the economy today.
There are over $9 quadrillion in payments made each year in our economy.
Our Income Represents Just 0.28% of the Payments!
This tax table shows how low your taxes would be if we taxed payments instead of income.
As astonishing as it seems, these low taxes represent your fair share of the revenue necessary to balance the budget and fund the benefits on this site, if every payment was taxed at 0.25%.
What taxing payments would mean to you
If you're single and earning $30k, your taxes would drop from $6k to just $75 .
WHY IT WORKS
In 1913, when income taxes were first imposed, income was the right thing to tax.
Henry Ford shocked the world when he paid his employees five dollars per day.
We entered an era in which the middle class grew and the gap between the rich and poor narrowed.
Automation changed everything in the 1970s.
Wages have been flat for the last 50 years, while production has continued to increase.
Automation caused a shift in jobs to the financial sector, which gave rise to unprecedented growth in the monetary economy.
The impact of our burgeoning monetary economy.
Unbridled growth in the monetary economy has led to an enormous increase in the disparity of wealth in America.
The rapid rise of the monetary economy has also led to the extreme disparity in income in America.
The disparity in income has led to a greater disparity in the ownership of equities in America.
Just 20% of Americans control 87% of the equity market in the nation.
A payments tax is the single most effective tool for mitigating these growing problems.
HOW IT WORKS
How a payments tax would be implemented
A payments tax would entail debiting a very small amount of each and every payment anyone receives.
Creating and deleting money.
The money debited from a payment would not be credited to any account at all.
This would delete the debited money from the money supply.
The Fed would create the money the government spends, which would replace the deleted money and balance the money supply.
Tribute to Dr. Feige
The work of Dr. Edgar Feige, Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, who first proposed the automated payments tax, is a major inspiration behind the solutions on this site.
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