“A controversial report released this month by the International Monetary Fund outlines schemes to have big-spending governments with out-of-control debts plunder humanity’s wealth using a mix of much higher taxes and outright confiscation. The goal: Prop up Big Government. Because people and their assets are generally mobile, the radical IMF document, dubbed “Taxing Times,” also proposes measures to prevent them from escaping before they can be fleeced. Of course, the real problems — debt-based fiat currency, lawless bank bailouts, and a cartel-run monetary system — are virtually ignored.
Pointing to absurd and rising levels of government debt, as well as increasing income inequality, the IMF document suggests there are few remaining options for desperate policymakers to explore. Two that are mentioned include “repudiating public debt” — in other words, defaulting on government bonds — or “inflating it away” by having privately owned central banks conjure even more gargantuan amounts of fiat currency into existence at interest. Both of those plots, of course, would still represent a massive transfer of wealth.
However, even though it hides behind the passive voice, the IMF preference for dealing with the debt problems appears to be simply confiscating the wealth more directly. “The sharp deterioration of the public finances in many countries has revived interest in a capital levy, a one-off tax on private wealth, as an exceptional measure to restore debt sustainability,” the report claims. “The appeal is that such a tax, if it is implemented before avoidance is possible, and there is a belief that it will never be repeated, does not distort behavior (and may be seen by some as fair).”
Reducing government debt ratios to “pre-crisis levels” seen at the end of 2007 — before the multi-trillion-dollar banker bailouts and ramping up of the lawless currency printing at central banks — will require “sizeable” tax rates, the IMF continues. Citing a sample of 15 euro-area nations, the report claims that all households with positive net wealth — anyone with more assets than debt, in essence — would have to surrender about 10 percent of it. Because many people who lived responsibly and saved would try to avoid the looting of their wealth, drastic measures must be considered to stop them.
“There is a surprisingly large amount of experience to draw on, as such levies were widely adopted in Europe after World War I and in Germany and Japan after World War II,” the IMF report notes. “This experience suggests that more notable than any loss of credibility was a simple failure to achieve debt reduction, largely because the delay in introduction gave space for extensive avoidance and capital flight, in turn spurring inflation [sic].”
By proposing the outright confiscation of middle-class wealth, analysts say the IMF is essentially acknowledging that simply looting “the rich” will not be enough to even restore government debt to “sustainable” levels. Still, the non-establishment “rich” would face by far the most ferocious assaults on their assets under the schemes outlined in the radical IMF report, which was promptly celebrated by Big Government-supporting politicians.
Noting that financial wealth and people are mobile, the document suggests that there “may be a case” for confiscating varying amounts of wealth using various means — all depending on how easy it would be for people to protect the assets in question from legalized looting. “Substantial progress likely requires enhanced international cooperation to make it harder for the very well-off to evade taxation by placing funds elsewhere,” the report says matter-of-factly.
Taxes on the “rich” of around 60 percent to 70 percent, according to the IMF, would likely be the rate at which the most plunder could be extracted for desperate governments. “A revenue-maximizing approach to taxing the rich effectively puts a weight of zero on their well-being,” the report explains, calling that notion “contentious.” “If one attaches less weight to those with the highest incomes, the vote would be to increase the top marginal rate.”
Private companies that try to reduce their already-crushing tax burdens using “tax planning schemes,” as the report calls them, are also in the IMF crosshairs for increased wealth confiscation. In a section headlined “Tricks of the Trade,” for example, the document blasts business efforts to provide services directly from “low-tax jurisdictions” as “abusive.”
In essence, the IMF and other taxpayer-funded international institutions hope to see a stronger global regulatory regime to ensure maximum wealth extraction via corporate taxation, too. “The chance to review international tax architecture seems to come about once a century; the fundamental issues should not be ducked,” the report argues.
The devastating consequences of squandering ever-greater amounts of productive capital on government programs, of course, are largely overlooked. Meanwhile, the unspoken assumption underpinning the radical ideas is essentially that companies exist to produce wealth for governments to spend — rather than value for shareholders and consumers as has traditionally been the case.
Looking past the bureaucratic language, the IMF caveats, its effort to hide behind the passive voice, and the thinly disguised attempt to make the heist sound palatable to the public because not everyone would be fleeced just yet…..”
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