***] The National Dividend (or shall we call it the BIG?) is not included in your Income so is not subject to tax, but the ¨grab back¨ is added in to the Receiver's calculation of the Tax you owe him. Once in his hands, the grab back amount is not fed into the general Revenue Account but goes once more into the Social Credit account to go out in further payments of National Dividends (BIG´s). [***
Actually, let's definitely not call it "the BIG." What we want is a dividend, not a grant. A grant implies that it is a gift. It is not a "gift" that is "granted" by the "haves" to the "have-nots," but a dividend deriving from right of ownership that we all share drawn from realizable productive capacity as reflected in the national credit account--which will benefit everybody. That is the message we are trying to convey.
As I understand what you are saying, the income- taxing process in South Africa is in three stages. 1) You report your income; 2) You are assessed an amount to pay based upon your reported income, and are sent a bill; 3) You pay the assessed amount. Is that correct?
Your proposal--the amount paid to you in your dividend is not counted as income for taxation purposes, but is "grabbed back" in the assessment. The fact that it is not counted as income allows the "grab back" when paid to be routed to the social credit not the general revenue account so it can be "re-cycled" as dividends? How does this differ from a loan from a revolving fund? And what does it accomplish? I still can't be understanding you. Or perhaps I am.
Count it as income. Tax it as income. Why not? That's the simplest way to do it. As your income increases from all sources, including the dividend, you become phased out of the various existing welfare and support programs as you reach their respective stop-limits. If the income tax is graduated, you pay more and more of your proportional income in taxes-- as does everyone else.
The point is, the dividend does not derive from the expense column of anyone's ledger, neither private enterprise or government. It is credit paid to consumers from the national credit account. The credit can be spent for anything, goods and services from the private sector, or taxes to government for the services of government.
The dividend checks themselves clear back to the national credit account--not government's account, not private enterprise's account, not the banking sector's account--thereby closing the "gap" between "prices" and "purchasing power." In this respect it is nothing more than an accounting adjustment so that it reflects reality--which is what accounting is supposed to be about.
As the accounting gap closes, the economy, as an economy, more and more approaches technical efficiency (which is always increasing)--thereby continually minimizing the meaningless exploitation of both labor and natural resources per unit output. --
This is the concluding segment of Dunhedin converted to plaintext:
[from second paragraph of page 9 to the end of pdf document]
There were £900,000,000 of deposits drawable by cheque in Great Britain, and the run of the banks exhausted all the gold in the country to the extent of just about £300,000,000. It was a very large sum of gold, and there was still £600,000,000 of deposits which were alleged to represent gold which could not be paid out. There were £600,000,000 of deposits which were alleged to have been deposited in gold for which no gold existed. They had been created by the process of issuing more receipts than there was gold.
What happened? The bankers said, "You cannot allow us to fail." Perfectly true, they could not be allowed to fail, they had a meeting in London, and it was decided that all debts must stand for three days, no one could demand the payment of debts for three or four days--I have forgotten which--and when the banks re-opened they were supplied with little white pieces of paper which said, "This note is legal tender for one pound sterling." People took the notes, they drew a few of them out, and they had a look at them, and they found they did not know much about them and they paid them again. They worked perfectly, and from that time to this the convention that money is always represented by something alleged to be of value like gold, is completely smashed.
What did they represent, those things that we all accepted as being good for £1. They represented a belief which was justified by facts that the general producing capacity of the country was responsible to the owner of one of those £1 notes to the extent of goods priced at £1. *In other words they rested on the general credit of the country.*
*But to return to those notes--we can save time by moving on to 1928, when the last Treasury Note was issued, and all notes in Great Britain are now issued by the Bank of England. There is no longer such a thing as a Treasury Note in existence, in circulation at any rate, and all notes bear a picture of the Bank of England and the signature of the Bank of England cashier. These notes are issued by the Bank of England and they are claimed as the property of the Bank of England. They are only lent and never given except in return for tangible wealth.*
*The consequence is that we have the extraordinary position that this ticket system, which is what it is, of course, has now passed into the hands of a private organisation, which is in a position to issue tentative tokens for all the real wealth which the productive organisation, which is something quite different, can produce, and it claims all these tentative tokens as the private property, and only lends them and never gives them except in return for tangible wealth. The consequence is that all wealth which is produced through the agency of money increases our corresponding debt to the bankers, and it is that debt system which is at the core of the present financial system.*
*It is quite an incredible thing, though it is true, that you should have an organisation not responsible to anybody, not elected by anybody, not dismissible by anybody, which as supreme control over trade and prosperity and industry by its control of this thing that we call money.* (Loud applause).
I had a talk with a very pleasant and kind and, indeed, eminently respectable bank manager in Wellington, quite accidentally, a week or two ago on quite ordinary matters. The conversation turned on the banking system, and he claimed that the banking system was a business like any other business, and that it was run in order to make a profit like any other business, and that the sole consideration that it had in mind was to carry it on along the successful lines of any other business.
*Well, I do not know whether that is an idea which is prevalent amongst all bankers. But if it is then it is the final condemnation of the banking system as it stands at the present time, because it is quite obvious that something which interpenetrates and controls the activities of the wealth-producing organisation on which we all live, cannot possibly, whether it is privately administered or whether it is publicly administered is not the point--but it cannot be run as a private interest. That is incredible. (Applause). It simply means that everybody's business is at the mercy of this private organisation, and we know that it is.*
Now, what is the distinguishing feature of this situation? I have already mentioned it. It is a lack of something we call purchasing power. What do we mean by that? We mean that to this producing organisation that we know is so powerful and so successful, and has brought us up to this point of potential wealth in which we are, is attached an accounting process which attaches something that we call a price to everything that it produces, and that price is ultimately and fundamentally based on something which we call cost, which is nothing but the addition of all the little costs that have gone to make the final price. So that you have a producing system on one side that does not produce money, but it does produce prices. It produces a certain set of figures which have to be met on the other side by something that we call purchasing power. Get that difference clearly in your mind, the difference between the production of prices, price values, and the purchasing power which will meet those prices. The two things are quire different, the are the opposite sides of the ledger.
*Now the defect of the economic society that we have at the present time, is a disparity between the collective prices which the producing system makes and the purchasing power which is available to transfer the goods with those price tickets attached to them to the people who want them. That is the distinguishing feature, and we have to put that right first of all.*
There is an obvious way in which you might attack that problem, and as is so very often the case with things, it is not the right way. You could print more of those little tickets which form purchasing power, but if you did that you would get into trouble, because, although prices cannot stay be cost for any length of time, they can rise to any extent above cost. The profit can be what the article will fetch and if you have more money about, articles begin to fetch more, not because they cost more, but because people have more money. That is true inflation. True inflation is a rise in the number of monetary tokens accompanied and paralleled by a rise of prices. That is inflation; an increase of purchasing power is not inflation.
Now you can attack this breach between the purchasing power and the prices by another method. You can leave for the moment the number of monetary tokens in the pockets of the population the same as they were before, and you can halve the prices. So far as the consumer was concerned he would now be able to buy what he could not buy before with the same amount of money because prices have been halved, but, of course, you would have obviously got into trouble with the producer. The producer would have lost what he had paid to a very large extent to produce the goods. Now, supposing you apply a portion of the credit of the country to make up the loss to the producer? You would not have increased the amount of money in the pockets of the consumer, but you would have halved the price, and so would have enabled him to buy the goods, and would have made up the loss to the producer out of the credit of the country, which is just production which you are now transferring to the consumer, and in that way you do not raise prices.
*Now there are people who say you cannot do that without raising prices, they say all that involves inflation, and in any case it is not a good thing to do and so forth. Well, now I would like to point out to you that one of the most conservative organisations in the world, the British shipping industry, is now asking that exactly that thing should be done, and that it should be allowed to sell its produce, transportation--below cost in order to dispose of it and get customers; and that the difference between price and cost should be made up to it by something that it calls a subsidy. That is what they are asking, and that is the most conservative organisation in the world.
*The only difference between what I am suggesting and what the shipping industry is asking, is that they want the benefits to be conveyed solely to the shipping industry, while I want the benefits to be spread over the entire community.* (Great applause).
But that in itself--while I have no doubt it will establish itself along those lines--is not sufficient. We have to recognise the nature of this producing system of ours. One of my colleagues in Great Britain, working along quite separate lines to myself in regard to his method of arriving at figures, arrived at almost the same numerical results in regard to Great Britain as I have done myself, and they were these: *That if production followed what engineers call a straight line curve, that is to say, if they only went on increasing at the same rate as they have from 1852, out of the population of Great Britain (45,000,000) of whom at the present time it is estimated that 13,000,000 are employable, we should have an unemployed population by 1942 of 8,000,000, simply by the increased productivity per unit of labor.*
*Take a very elementary, a very extreme instance. The ordinary motorcar of a fairly powerful type--I am speaking of modern business at the present time--as late as 1920 took 1100 man-ours to produce--that is, the work of 1100 men for one hour or one man for 1100 hours. That is the way we estimate time in these matters. Last year the motorcar took 90 man-hours to produce! It had come down from 1100 to 90 in twelve years, and the same thing, not quite at that rate, but the same thing, is going on all over the field of production.*
*It goes on quickly in so-called times of prosperity because people have money with which to buy new machines and it goes on almost as quickly in times of slump because they have to find ways of producing more goods with less labour.*
*And always there is this desire to produce more and more goods with less and less labour, so that we have to recognise as a fundamental condition of this production system of ours that it tends by its very nature to the production of what is called unemployment--but it ought to be called leisure--and that to tackle this problem as if it were a problem of getting the world back to work is to practically misconceive the very nature of the problem from the very start.* (Loud applause).
Of course you can, if you wish to retain that deductive habit of mind which says that everybody ought to be made to work, you can say, "very well, we will treat this as an unemployment problem, and then I will tell you how to solve it, namely, to break of your machines, drown your inventors, and go back to handicrafts." (Laughter). But if you recognise that the system of wealth creation requires a diminishing amount of labour to operate it, you must turn your faces to how you are going to get that wealth over to the people who are not employed. You know now that that is quite simple, in essence. We know exactly how to do it. Everybody who owns a few shares in come concern which happily many be paying a dividend- -there are very few of them today--well, everyone of those gets a dividend warrant which is not al all a portion of the production of that company; it is a demand, a sight-draft upon the general wealth; not upon the wealth that company produces, but upon any wealth. Now, all you have to do is to extend that draft system upon the general wealth of the country-- because the general wealth of the country rests upon its cultural wealth. It won't work otherwise. We should all draw a dividend warrant on this cultural wealth which has come down to us. I think you can for yourself with no difficulty see the ethical justification of that, unless, of course, you persist in assuming that there are some fundamental laws of nature which show that man has to remain permanently uncomfortable to get his daily bread whether he can get it without being uncomfortable or not. (Laughter).
*If you are going to have huge wealth producing organisations and you do not take the wealth away from these organisations, then that wealth is wasted and the whole machine is clogged and rots and you have the situation that you have at the present time. Broadly speaking, that is really all that is necessary to solve, the first beginning in order to end the present terrible situation.*
*Do not let anyone suppose that I am saying that there will be no problems left in the world to solve when this problem is monetary depression is solved. Of course, there will; I have not the slightest doubt there will. What I do say without any fear of contradiction by anyone who will base their argument upon a knowledge of facts, is that until this problem is solved you have no hope whatever of solving any other. (Applause).
*I endorse heartily the words of the writer of this article in the London Chamber of Commerce journal: "All the efforts towards international goodwill and co-operation and so forth are just windy nonsense as long as you have a situation which makes it inevitable that in order to maintain the first law of life, which is self-preservation, you have to scramble among yourselves for a diminishing proportion of an insufficient number of tickets which are issued by an organisation which fundamentally has no right to the power."*
*And you will have to solve that problem or without the slightest double it will solve you. (Continued applause).
[A vote of thanks was moved by Miss M. H. M. King, M.A., and seconded by Rev. P. Paris.] --
----Original Message Follows---- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test? Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2003 18:23:17 +0200
On Friday 26 Sep 2003 9:30 pm, Bill wrote: > Okay, so in South Africa, unlike the United States, > the "first desideratum" remains operative. Your job > is to convince the authorities to give the social > credit idea a chance
Thanks, Bill -- this concession represents a breakthrough for all of us :-)
> By "assessment" you mean taxation, don't you?
Yes -- you render your Return of Income and the Receiver works out what you
owe him and then responds with the Tax Assessment, and you send him a cheque.
> But "grab back" is just redistribution through > taxation which makes it something other than social > credit. I can't be understanding you here.
The National Dividend (or shall we call it the BIG?) is not included in your Income so is not subject to tax, but the ¨grab back¨ is added in to the Receiver´s calculation of the Tax you owe him. Once in his hands, the grab back amount is not fed into the general Revenue Account but goes once more into the Social Credit account to go out in further payments of National Dividends (BIG´s).
> We know more about working > with and bringing pressure on the authorities. All > we need is a demonstration project somewhere in the > world to get the snowball rolling.
This is what I´m after, but I don´t know ff I´m big enough to swing it. But I
do keep plugging away at it.
Jessop. ----------------------------
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