Dear sir/madam
I am a 26 year old father. My partner and I have 2 children, of which both are boys. The eldest, 6 years and the youngest, 6 months. My partner and I both work and collectively take home around £28000 annually. We currently claim our small allotment of child benefit but we do not claim Working Tax Credit. This is due to being surprised with a £6000 bill for overpayment. We tried to follow the obvious route of dispute but this failed and we have been forced to pay this back at a rate that their claims department deemed affordable. We therefore do not claim this anymore through fear. We live week by week and are struggling like most are. I only give you this information so you can understand that my family and I are working class and part of the tax paying majority.
I am a 26 year old father. My partner and I have 2 children, of which both are boys. The eldest, 6 years and the youngest, 6 months. My partner and I both work and collectively take home around £28000 annually. We currently claim our small allotment of child benefit but we do not claim Working Tax Credit. This is due to being surprised with a £6000 bill for overpayment. We tried to follow the obvious route of dispute but this failed and we have been forced to pay this back at a rate that their claims department deemed affordable. We therefore do not claim this anymore through fear. We live week by week and are struggling like most are. I only give you this information so you can understand that my family and I are working class and part of the tax paying majority.
I have decided to write this letter due to my sheer frustration over the composition and state of the United Kingdom, and global financial structure/economy. In order to do this properly I feel it's highly important to address a critical issue affecting the majority of our great nations population. This issue is the fact that an enormous amount of us leave eduction with very little, if any understanding of how our financial system works. But more importantly, how money is created. This fact has often left me wondering if this lack of financial education is deliberate?
Many of us simply assume that money emerges from trade within the economy. This idea is essentially flawed and incredibly nieve. Money is created very simply as debt. When you enter into a contract with your Bank, perhaps for a mortgage or other type of loan, you would probably assume that the financial institution you are borrowing from is lending you their money, or the money of their customers. This is rarely the case. Generally the Banks create this money, essentially from thin air. They type the digits you require into your account and from the instant the Bank employee presses enter, that money emerges into existence. No funds are moved around and no coins are minted. From that moment on you are obliged to pay this money back along with vast amounts of interest, fees and charges. This process accounts for 97% of money created in the British economy. The remaining 3% is created by the Government in a process known as seigniorage. That very unusual word basically means the difference in value between the cost of producing a bank note and the value it represents. So if it costs 5 pence to produce a £10 note, the government will have made £9.95 profit when it sells that note to the banks. The profit made is in turn used to reduce our tax burden. However in the grand scheme of things it really doesn't amount to a great deal.
So there you have it. A small amount of knowledge that you may not have had before reading this. It's critical that every person know this because our economy is completely dependent on the creation of debt. It is incredible how many people do not understand these very basic facts. Always remember that you are the creditor of your own debt.
Our economy is inherently flawed due to this very process. The banks have complete control over 97% of fiscal creation, but along with this 100% control over where this constant flow of new money is invested and this leads to enormous, damaging problems. These problems are known by their dreaded alias. (Bubbles). You only have to take a brief glance at our housing market to see this detrimental process at work. Our house prices are drastically over inflated. This is because a mortgage is a relatively safe bet. Buyers often put down large deposits and if there is ever a problem paying the mortgage, the house can be repossessed. Leaving the Bank with very little if any losses. This gives the financiers incentive to fund more and more mortgages which inturn drives house prices up. As you pay back more and more, the bankers reap more and more in interest. The longer you pay, the more you pay.
If your a homeowner you may well be reading this thinking this is a good thing. You bought your home for £45k and now it's worth £180k. Well for you, yes it's awesome. But that extra £135k is what it is going to cost the next generation, your children extra to buy a home. Every penny you gain, your children lose. All in all it is a lose lose situation. All the housing bubble has done is price our children out of ever owning a home! The chances are you will have to use all that extra value in your home to pay for your care in later life anyway. This is just 1 example of how letting bankers completely control the creation of money is destroying our future.
This brings me to regulation within the financial sector. Since Thatcher there has been a highly paced race to the bottom. Not just here but everywhere. The reason given for this was that if we could free up the banks from regulation they could perform better being less restricted. That ideology is complete and utter idiocy. What ended up happening is akin to leaving a group of children unattended in a sweet shop and asking them not to eat the sweets. When you come back the shop is empty!
This situation created a boom in the economy, but that very boom was spawned from irresponsible or predatory lending. The bankers were allowed to merge their companies into behemoths that are now deemed too big to fail. They also created a system where they could package worthless debts and make it look as if it was AAA, top notch safe bets. Coupled with a market that allowed them to sell that debt to anyone who wanted it. This was their insurance! They knew they would be bailed out by us if anything went wrong, so with everything in place (They went to town!) They did everything they could to maximize profits and the end result was a fat bill for the working class. Who in turn have to swallow draconian austerity measures.
Recent estimates indicate that at least 100 million people have been forced into poverty as a direct result of this financial crash. Every day we find out more about the enormity of fraud and money laundering that's going on constantly within our financial system. Out of that 100 million poverty stricken people it is a certainty that many of them will die prematurely and needlessly through the actions of what can only be described as Banksters! Yet we have not seen 1 arrest. The LIBOR scandal affected over $800 trillion in transactions yet we were denied a public inquiry and nobody has lost their freedom to date. The reason for this is very simple. Our elected officials rely entirely on donations for their election campaigns. These doners are the very same people who created this crash. I was raised with a very simple belief and that is "He who pays the piper, calls the tune" Our politicians should be answerable to us but they are not. We are told to make them answer by using our votes but how is that possible when we have only 2 viable choices and they are different sides of the same coin.
In the 1960s even in postwar decline, an entire family could function on the wages of 1 parent and still own their home. Now it takes 2, often working different shifts and being reduced to nothing more than ships passing in the night. Our family units are working harder than ever leaving us very little quality of life.
I am so angry about this situation. All our government needs to do is regulate. Take the power of fiscal creation away from banks and make them lend their own money. We should chose where investment is made and use it to benefit us and future generations. How many people must suffer and die before we the people wake up?
The whole system is so utterly dependent on the creation of debt that without new debt we are in recession, it is as simple as that. So when you hear David Cameron saying "We need to become a nation of savers" it's plain for all to see that he obviously has no clue about the monetary system of the country he leads. If everyone saved we would have mass disappearance of money and the economy would collapse. The very fact that we need this debt to survive means that the economy is completely dependent on the debt enslavement of the poor. There I said it. Were slaves! The rich don't need loans, the poor do. This financial tyranny exists simply to steal from the poor and give to the rich. It's reverse Robin Hood on steroids! My beliefs are not anticapitalist, there is absolutely no reason why we can't have a vibrant competitive economy and still have something by the people for the people.
It is time for justice. We were told that if we arrested the bankers and changed the system we would face a meltdown. That was a lie! Iceland have done this and although their economy shrank by over 6%, within a few years they were back on track and are now doing much better than the majority of nations within the Eurozone. They even managed to forgive debt to all those struggling.
I am a young parent who is horrified to witness this national fleecing and is dreadfully worried about the future my children face. There is so much national debt that mathematically it cannot be paid back and we are heading for an almost certain collapse unless we change things now. Everything the government has proposed to tackle these problems amounts to nothing more than sticking plasters. They are treating cancer symptoms but sooner or later we will die from the disease.
We are now seeing huge protests and demonstrations by the awakened portion of the population and the numbers are growing everyday. We have seen riots and looting. We want fairness and justice, not just financially but politically. We are no longer content to be mere serfs. Throughout history, oppression leads only to revolution. Our politicians have a choice. Do the right thing and join the ever increasing flow of the stream or delay and be drowned by the flood!
Yours faithfully
Wiggy
1 comment:
Thank you for posting my letter. It was sent to all local and national newspapers.
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