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Someone please explain to me why we have taxes, and why we should pay them.


Paying taxes is an oxymoron (if i understand the definition correctly, it's when contradictory terms are combined together?). I know the answers to the above but i need someone to explain the logic of paying taxes (other than a standard low tax to retire old money and allow new money-to be spent into the economy through public and private works-to enter the system to avoid inflation).


And i don't want to hear "but how will the schools be run, the roads built" blah blah. so come on, someone explain this to me.

[KMA]Avenger wrote:Someone please explain to me why we have taxes, and why we should pay them.


Paying taxes is an oxymoron (if i understand the definition correctly, it's when contradictory terms are combined together?). I know the answers to the above but i need someone to explain the logic of paying taxes (other than a standard low tax to retire old money and allow new money-to be spent into the economy through public and private works-to enter the system to avoid inflation).


And i don't want to hear "but how will the schools be run, the roads built" blah blah. so come on, someone explain this to me.

So you want to know why we are taxed, but you dont want to hear about the provision and administration of public services like Hospitals, Schools, Police, Army, transport links etc

Now that is an oxymoron




Taxation can be used to 'cool down' or 'heat up' the economy by encouraging or discouraging spending but raising funds to be spent on the above services is the primary goal

The real question should be what is the best & fairest method of taxation ?

In the UK we have dozens of taxes, on income, on spending, on interest earned, on property value, on fuel, on vehicles and pretty much everything else you can imagine. They are not fair taxes, nor are they spent efficiently, hence why most people object to them.

But that's the contradictory thing about taxes as we have them, not 1 penny raised from say fuel duty and the VAT on top of it goes to actually funding the roads in the UK. by the same token, not 1 penny from the sale of cigarettes goes towards the up keep of the NHS. don't take my word for this, go check it our for yourself...EVERY single penny without exception raised in taxes go towards the interest owed accumulated from monies borrowed from the BoE (we've gone over this ground before, just not in relation to taxation and why we put up with it).

So if we stop borrowing money from the BoE the only taxation you would require is as i mentioned above, a small tax to retire old money. plus you would also have to have a small import tax. apart from that, every penny spent by the Govt into the economy would be interest free....does nobody understand the seriousness of what we are doing by borrowing money and the benefits we would gain by printing our own money???

[KMA]Avenger wrote:But that's the contradictory thing about taxes as we have them, not 1 penny raised from say fuel duty and the VAT on top of it goes to actually funding the roads in the UK. by the same token, not 1 penny from the sale of cigarettes goes towards the up keep of the NHS. don't take my word for this, go check it our for yourself...EVERY single penny without exception raised in taxes go towards the interest owed accumulated from monies borrowed from the BoE (we've gone over this ground before, just not in relation to taxation and why we put up with it).

So if we stop borrowing money from the BoE the only taxation you would require is as i mentioned above, a small tax to retire old money. plus you would also have to have a small import tax. apart from that, every penny spent by the Govt into the economy would be interest free....does nobody understand the seriousness of what we are doing by borrowing money and the benefits we would gain by printing our own money???

you have to get rid of debts first before actually spending money. in addition, government workers won't get paid if there's no actual government income.

the solution is not to keep printing money, either: since there is more in circulation afterwords, the value decreases (basic eco here). the aforementioned "retiring tax" would have to be nearly equal to the amount that the govt would be printing, which in itself would be huge.

ramen07 wrote:

[KMA]Avenger wrote:But that's the contradictory thing about taxes as we have them, not 1 penny raised from say fuel duty and the VAT on top of it goes to actually funding the roads in the UK. by the same token, not 1 penny from the sale of cigarettes goes towards the up keep of the NHS. don't take my word for this, go check it our for yourself...EVERY single penny without exception raised in taxes go towards the interest owed accumulated from monies borrowed from the BoE (we've gone over this ground before, just not in relation to taxation and why we put up with it).

So if we stop borrowing money from the BoE the only taxation you would require is as i mentioned above, a small tax to retire old money. plus you would also have to have a small import tax. apart from that, every penny spent by the Govt into the economy would be interest free....does nobody understand the seriousness of what we are doing by borrowing money and the benefits we would gain by printing our own money???

you have to get rid of debts first before actually spending money. in addition, government workers won't get paid if there's no actual government income.

the solution is not to keep printing money, either: since there is more in circulation afterwords, the value decreases (basic eco here). the aforementioned "retiring tax" would have to be nearly equal to the amount that the govt would be printing, which in itself would be huge.

Not trying to be rude or condescending mate, seriously, did you read what i wrote or just skim over my posts?
You say "the solution is not to keep printing money, either: since there is more in circulation afterwords, the value decreases", i already addressed that and the other points you made.

The way it would work is like this, firstly, ALL debt would be wiped out ( i would like to see the private shareholders of the central banks try to intimidate a nation to pay a fraudulent debt...i would pay to see that one!) by order of the people and the Govt. 2ndly, banks would be forbidden to practice the charging of interest for loans made. since there is an inherent risk in making loans and also running a bank is not free, banks would be allowed to make a one off administration charge to cover costs, risks and to allow a small profit so the bank can expand it's business by making even more loans, not just making profits for profits sake. no private shareholders would be allowed to have shares in banks, the customers would be the shareholders allowing the customers to also make loans to each other through the bank (+ a small charge for the bank and to the customer making the loan).

Money would be created through Govt and would be spent into circulation through the commission of public works, such as new hospitals, roads, bridges, schools the payment of civil workers and so on. money would also need to be retired, it cannot remain in circulation while Govt prints and spends because as has been rightly pointed out by you and others, this would lead to Weimar Republic inflation and the whole thing would collapse.
The Govt would also be able to take a small portion of the money created and invest it in new technologies which could then be passed on to the nation and also sold for profit to other nations...how cool would that be?!
Also, the nations resources belong to the people, corporations would be forbidden from buying up these resources and selling them for profit. corporations would be allowed to harvest and refine the resources and sell them at cost to the people of the nation, or they run the risk of being nationalised and owned outright by the people. in short, no drilling for oil within our waters and then charging an arm and a leg so we can drive to work, or keep the lights on, or keep ourselves warm. i could go on but you get the point that having control of your own money supply brings not only the benefit of minimal taxes and no interest thereby eliminating all debts to foreign private banks, but also you would have a truly free market.

That's a small run down and not meant to be the AtoZ solution. top economists would need to be employed to insure the success of such an undertaking. suffice to say this is not a new concept, in fact it's very old.

The benefits, we the people get first use of the money instead of the banks/ers, but it also would not have the added burden put on the money supply by so many taxes and so much interest. the result, no national debt and no debt would be needed to keep money in circulation.

You really, REALLY, REALLY need to take an Economics class. You clearly have no idea how economies on any scale work.

There is simply no way of knowing what taxes pay for in the UK at least (I suspect that the same applies to other countries as well however, prime suspects include the US/Canada and probably places like France/Germany etc in Europe) becuase all of the taxes collected are not ringfenced, ie road tax & income tax is all paid into the same govermnet held account.

The loans the UK takes out from people like the IMF etc, also go into this same account.

So there really is no possible way you could tell what money paid for XYZ.

EDIT: Yes I know thats a really simple way of looking at it & yes i'm probably glossing over some parts, but lets start simple eh??

Empy wrote:You really, REALLY, REALLY need to take an Economics class. You clearly have no idea how economies on any scale work.

You do realise that the system i proposed above is not new, and defo not my idea. but it is an idea i fully support. it's something that has been done in the past as i said, in fact the most successful form of money were sticks of wood called tally sticks. that system of money lasted 800 years, more than any other monitory system in history. it was also the most stable form of money in history. in fact, the first shareholders of the BoE bought into the new bank with those same sticks of wood!

Please good sir/madam...enlighten me as to why this system-which is crumbling as we speak-is better than a system that is tried and true.




@SS, you dont need to borrow money from the BoE (or any other central bank) and then put the bill on the people.

I asked a question but the response is always the same, "how the hell do you run a country if we don't have taxes!?"
Instead you should be asking the question, how did lil ol Britain build a global empire without a tax system?! but i spose in your book that would be impossible so therefore it never happened and anyone who thinks the Brits had a global empire is a tin foil hat wearer. The British empire was built on the tally stick system. the ships were paid for with tally sticks. the arms and ammunition was paid for with tally sticks, the troops were paid with tally sticks. and why did people accept sticks of wood in place of more conventional forms of money...because the Govt built in value by declaring all taxes (which were used to retire old money to guard against inflation) to be paid using tally sticks.



@KF, i have no problem at all with simple.

Well maybe it's just me but I don't personally think the economies of today are the same as hundreds and hundreds of years ago when they used sticks as money. Again, you clearly don't know how economies work if you're taking such a simplistic view.

hmm some people are funny lol i hate taxes as mush as everyone else but they are a necessary part of a social structure you have to pay for things.

Empy wrote:Well maybe it's just me but I don't personally think the economies of today are the same as hundreds and hundreds of years ago when they used sticks as money. Again, you clearly don't know how economies work if you're taking such a simplistic view.

How is it a simplistic view? all i am proposing/supporting is the outright banning of Govts ability to borrow money, the removal of the charging of interest and the banning of it's use which puts undue pressure and a burden on the money supply. is that not a viable and workable option?

form fist wrote:hmm some people are funny lol i hate taxes as mush as everyone else but they are a necessary part of a social structure you have to pay for things.

You tell people there is a way to run our society and economies in a BETTER way without the need for taxation on the level we have now, and they say stuff like "i hate taxes, but we need to pay taxes to run things", NO you don't!



Money has absolutely ZERO value, even precious metals and gems have zero value. can you take a gem or gold pay or a £ or $ and eat it to keep from starving? the answer is obvious. but you can take your labour grow some seeds and feed you and your family.
The only thing that has value IS your labour. when your labour is taxed by Govt, that is theft, plain and simple.

the removal of the charging of interest and the banning of it's use which puts undue pressure and a burden on the money supply.

You should be happy, that's what Islamic finance/banking is proposing, so it does exist. Removal of interest (theoretically at least).


Anyway, I don't see how your world without taxes would work, considering even the Modern Age Monarchies used them quite a bit...

Legendary Apophis wrote:

the removal of the charging of interest and the banning of it's use which puts undue pressure and a burden on the money supply.

You should be happy, that's what Islamic finance/banking is proposing, so it does exist. Removal of interest (theoretically at least).


Anyway, I don't see how your world without taxes would work, considering even the Modern Age Monarchies used them quite a bit...

Jim, it works because you have a basic taxation system for the removal of the old currency. you cant just print cash and throw it into the economy because a bank is bankrupt like they are doing now...you seen the price rises since 09 when the bailouts started?

That money should have been spent into the economy by building national infrastructure. instead it was crated out of thin air and thrown in to the system.

Also, we have a fractional reserve system, that means the banks can create money they don't have, make loans with this non existent money and charge you interest for the use of nothing...how is that a good economy?


Edit, in the US (i suspect the UK as well but have not been able to confirm this) there is no law that requires the US people to pay taxes. it's a historical fact that the US had no income tax or it's other forms of taxation up until 1913 when the Federal Reserve was illegally signed into law. i say illegally because the Fed and other bodies are forbidden from issuing and borrowing money to the US Govt. that right is reserved in the constitution to the congress/the people. 1 of the founding fathers (i forget which one,but not to hard to find out), lamented that they wished they had made an amendment to the constitution-stripping from the Govt of all power to borrow money for any reason.


More quotes for you:


"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain."

-Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France.


"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies."
-Thomas Jefferson, US President 1801-9.


"The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing."

-William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England in 1694, a privately owned bank.


"I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hand the destiny of the people."
-Reginald McKenna, as Chairman of the Midland Bank, addressing stockholders in 1924.


"If the American people ever allow private banks to control issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

-Thomas Jefferson in the debate over The Re-charter of the Bank Bill (1809).


"That this House considers that the continued issue of all the means of exchange - be they coin, bank-notes or credit, largely passed on by cheques - by private firms as an interest-bearing debt against the public should cease forthwith; that the Sovereign power and duty of issuing money in all forms should be returned to the Crown, then to be put into circulation free of all debt and interest obligations..."

-Captain Henry Kerby MP, in an Early Day Motion tabled in 1964.



"Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing. "

-Ralph M Hawtry, former Secretary to the Treasury.



A more recent banking quote:

"... our whole monetary system is dishonest, as it is debt-based... We did not vote for it. It grew upon us gradually but markedly since 1971 when the commodity-based system was abandoned."
-The Earl of Caithness, in a speech to the House of Lords, 1997.


"Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal - that there is no human relation between master and slave."

-Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer.

[KMA]Avenger wrote:Not trying to be rude or condescending mate, seriously, did you read what i wrote or just skim over my posts?
You say "the solution is not to keep printing money, either: since there is more in circulation afterwords, the value decreases", i already addressed that and the other points you made.

Not to be rude or condescending, but I read what I reply to, not just what I quote. YOU said

[KMA]Avenger wrote:So if we stop borrowing money from the BoE the only taxation you would require is as i mentioned above, a small tax to retire old money. plus you would also have to have a small import tax. apart from that, every penny spent by the Govt into the economy would be interest free....does nobody understand the seriousness of what we are doing by borrowing money and the benefits we would gain by printing our own money???

When you don't have enough of your own money, you have a few options.
1. borrow
2. sell your old **Filtered**
3. convince people to buy your new **Filtered**
4. print more money

There's probably more, I'm too tired to find them. You suggested printing more money. Which either meant
1. you plan on retiring the same amount of money, which would put your thoughts in conjunction with your 'small tax' idea to retire old money as stated in the above quote, or
2. you plan on only introducing that money into the economy, provoking higher inflation rates, or
3. some combination of both.

Further points (way too damned tired to quote them all):

All debt being wiped out by the order of the people and the government? Governments are the largest debtors and creditors by far, and since when does the 'order of the people' have any power against the same people they elect into office/see put into place over them?

No loans are free of interest...that's kind of the idea of loans? "here's some money you can borrow, just pay it back, k?" doesn't fly with providing a service at their risk. administration charges won't fix that, since each loan has its own risk attached. plus, what single individual do you know would straight loan money, no interest, to other customers of the same bank? trust issues galore.

As to creating money to be spent while money is retired to prevent inflation...that's just another additional step to what's already happening. it's ultimately the same amount of money, just crisper bills, same debt.

I'm sorry, but this takes the cake:

[KMA]Avenger wrote:Money has absolutely ZERO value, even precious metals and gems have zero value. can you take a gem or gold pay or a £ or $ and eat it to keep from starving? the answer is obvious. but you can take your labour grow some seeds and feed you and your family.
The only thing that has value IS your labour. when your labour is taxed by Govt, that is theft, plain and simple.

Oh please...what a romanticized view of it all. if we still operated on those terms, there would be nothing but food everywhere. "oh, i need transportation to my job. can i buy a car?" "yeah, just costs you 12.3 thousand bags of rice." "what the hell, why??" "do you know how many employees I have to feed every week?." just from getting materials to design to testing to prototyping etc. all the way to marketing and selling, that's an entire cluster____ of a system to work out. you know that won't work. money has value because it gets THINGS, and is payment for WORKING. you buy food to EAT and THINGS so someone else gets PAID for WORKING, so they can EAT and buy THINGS.

It's not a great system we have, but hell, it's a lot better than what could be in place. the same has been said of democratic republic- not perfect nor always functional by a long shot, but it is currently the lesser of a number of "evils", excuse the damn cliche.

What school of economics do you guys study at!?


You raise to many points for me to be bothered to break it all down, so i'll just post a general reply.

Firstly, you can never run out of money, the trick to avoiding inflation and having loooooong term stability to economy is to make sure that the money is retired...regardless of how much you have in circulation....so long as the money that is in circulation was SPENT into the economy via works of all kinds...you can't just dump it in as they are doing now.

Also, you need to realise something, ALL money that is in circulation now was created out of debt...it was borrowed with debt attached. in the current debt based system, it is a fact that if you pay off the debt then the money supply dries up...do you understand that we borrow money that NEVER existed, was not created by labour...it is created out of NOTHING, it has NO VALUE (other than the peoples trust), and you are then forced to pay for it's use via taxes...i don't know how many ways i can tell you the same thing before you understand that THIS IS FRAUD! you try doing what banks do and see what happens!

ramen07 wrote:
Oh please...what a romanticized view of it all. if we still operated on those terms, there would be nothing but food everywhere. "oh, i need transportation to my job. can i buy a car?" "yeah, just costs you 12.3 thousand bags of rice." "what the hell, why??" "do you know how many employees I have to feed every week?." just from getting materials to design to testing to prototyping etc. all the way to marketing and selling, that's an entire cluster____ of a system to work out. you know that won't work. money has value because it gets THINGS, and is payment for WORKING. you buy food to EAT and THINGS so someone else gets PAID for WORKING, so they can EAT and buy THINGS.

It's not a great system we have, but hell, it's a lot better than what could be in place. the same has been said of democratic republic- not perfect nor always functional by a long shot, but it is currently the lesser of a number of "evils", excuse the damn cliche.

What planet are you on!?! are you telling me that bits of paper with ink on it has inherent value? are you kidding me or what??

Have you read and tried to understand anything of what i wrote above? Money is a means of exchange without the need to keep track of what we owe and who we owe it to. if you have a small community then battering for products and services is a viable way to live and get the things we need. past a certain number or if someone within said community does not want anything that is being offered but others want your wares then you can all agree together that something has value so as to allow the exchange of goods and services to take place so we can all get what we want and need to live....it's that simple. you can use monopoly money if you like...hell...you can even use dog crap if you all agree that it has value.


If you cannot or are unable to understand that money (bits of paper and digits in your accounts) have no value, you have no idea what money is and should really do some homework of your own.