Will we pay taxes in the future?

Will we pay taxes in the future?

Will future citizens pay future taxes? (That's taxes not taxis). 

As both a self-promoted Futurist, Sci-Fi novelist and a veteran tax-planning accountant, I am honour bound to prophesy the evolution of taxation. Dominic Lawson in the UK's Sunday Times, today tackles Polly Toynbee of The Guardian, who wants all of us including politicians to publish our tax-returns. Dominic warns of the "Fire of Envy" consuming communities and of kidnappers and murderers targeting rich families who have foolishly revealed their income and assets; though I would have thought that the private yacht, personal plane and six mansions might give sufficient clues to bounty hunters. Polly Toynbee envisages the end of hypocrisy from all those who would impose penalties on millions of minor tax infractions while for themselves Minimising (legal and government sanctioned) Avoiding (legal but a bit creepy) or Evading (illegal - "...Which prison bunk do you prefer?") their own taxes by thousands, millions and billions of dollars a year.  My immediate focus would be on officers in the UK Treasury who themselves indulge in fanciful transactions with their family off-shore trusts, charities and secretive companies – what chance of a crackdown on tax frauds if the legal officials are in it up to their necks.

REPATRIATE THE LOOT: Both Polly and Dominic miss the main damage done to the 99%, to the rest of us. The tax dodgers not only fiddle the books to pay less tax - but many of them, in fact probably most of them, fiddle via off-shore companies, trusts, family charities and other sham organisations - and not only pay no taxes but they siphon the capital out of the very economies that have made them wealthy. Having imaginatively created invoices, agreements, bonds, trusts and other funny bits of quasi-legal paper to get tax relief on their profits at home - from industrious, stable, reliable, hard working communities - papers which currently many tax-authorities approve even though they are obviously fake; they take the cake and the icing to strange little countries with funny little governments that do as they are told by the super-rich.

The icing is the Homeland tax relief granted - billions and billions of unpaid taxes that the 99% have to compensate their Homeland for; the cake is the total capital they gouge out of the main economies and hide off-shore – before telling us our nations are bankrupt and have no liquidity. Currently, Christian Aid and the OECD in Paris calculate that from $14 trillion to $18 trillion washes around in tax-haven banks – so its no wonder there is no liquidity at home.

What do the 1% do with the capital they have extracted from our businesses and High Streets? They first globally gamble incontinently with it and distort every key price of vital commodities - distorting all prices everywhere - then, tiring of those silly games they lend it back to us via "The Free Markets" - those mysterious shadowy entities that set conditions for international Bonds, Bail-Outs and other "rescues", which are only needed because the 1% have purloined all the cash. $14 trillion will pay-off every deficit on Earth. The money-economy is bust because THEY have taken all the money out of our nations tills and piggy-banks. This is true for Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Spain – they are all suffering capital flight, to tax-havens, most established by Britain – and of course Switzerland – and now spreading like a plague. .

Will this last into the Future? No. In the far future there will be no taxes.

It is an unsustainable, mad state of affairs. The Internet will reveal all. The past 30 years of siphons will be reversed and the taxes and capital repatriated to the countries of origin. My best professional advice is - Move your Money On-Shore (repatriate before the government does it for you) and Move to Higher Ground (before the land based icecaps melt). Read OUT OF THE DEPTHS and AD2516 to see how it all pans out.

And - remember, if you are a smug Off-Shore-Johnny, President Bush Snr said in the 1980's about the Internet - "Forget privacy - Privacy is dead".  They (your friendly tax-officers, secret-service-intelligence agents, Internet government snoopers and Julian Assange) do know where you live.

15 April 2012.