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| Joined: | Mon Nov 21st, 2005 |
| Location: | California USA |
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Why don't we return to the "redistributive" policies which worked so well in the past? Do you think "progressive taxation" is crucial for maintaining democracy and establishing greater equity among the people?
So in most years no taxable income is reported at all. Real estate owners don't even have to pay a tax on capital gains what Mill called the unearned increment if they plow back their sales proceeds into buying even more assets. And this is just what the great majority of wealth-holders do. They keep on trading and accumulating, tax-free. The situation is much the same with companies taken over by corporate raiders. Paying interest to junk bond holders absorbs what formerly were taxable earnings paid out as dividends. This is what really is crippling the U.S. tax system and de-industrializing the economy.
I don't see the tax issue being discussed by Congress, except by anti-government tax cutters. And I don't see a realistic discussion beginning until people define just what progressive taxation means. It has to start with defining some kinds of income and investment as more economically productive than others. This would end the tax subsidies for debt leveraging and financial speculation.
I can cut in here and offer:
"Government" by the people own their own monetary currency so who, then, recives the profits from that supply?
The answer is simple. The people profit from their currency equitably when the currency is supplied as a non-profit enterprise or, in other words, the profits (interest) goes to 'government' to finance government i.e. Interest on money is a TAX.
That is an example of 'discussion' albiet one part of 'discussion'.
The next quote is now saved for my wife to read:
MW: How should Obama approach the issue of "debt relief" for the victims of the housing boondoggle who are now losing their homes in record numbers? African Americans were particularly hurt by the subprime fiasco. Is there a way to minimize the losses of people who were trapped in a banker's scam?
Michael Hudson: Foreclosures are an age-old problem, so there is a broad repertory of ways to deal with them. In my mind the most effective law is New York State's law of Fraudulent Conveyance. On the books back when New York was a colony, it was retained when New York joined the United States. The problem was that rapacious English creditors sought to grab New York's rich upstate farmland. Their ploy was to lend mortgage money to farmers who pledged their land as collateral. Then they would foreclose sometimes before the crop was in and farmers simply lacked the liquidity to pay. Other lenders would lend too much for the borrowers to pay back when the loan was suddenly called in as could be done back then. So New York passed a law ruling that if a creditor made a loan without having a realistic idea of how the debtor was to pay it back, the transaction would be deemed to be fraudulent and the debt would be declared null and void.
In the 1980s, companies brought this defense against corporate raiders using junk bonds as their weapon of choice. Targeted companies claimed that they would be forced to downsize radically or even have their assets stripped to the point of bankruptcy. I thought that Third World countries that borrowed from the large New York banks should have raised this defense, as the only way they could pay was by either borrowing the interest, or (as matters turned out) stripped their assets by privatizing their public domain to raise the dollars.
Today, fraudulent bank loans such as Countrywide is accused of making would be prime examples of junk mortgages that should be annulled. But the mayor of Cleveland went further. He brought public nuisance charges against banks whose mortgage lending has led to foreclosures leaving homes vacant. They're being stripped by robbers and used as crack houses. Junk mortgage lenders should be liable to pay the clean-up costs of the debt pollution they've created.
MW: That sounds pretty radical.
Michael Hudson: But that's where the law itself is moving. Just last week, on June 26 after attorneys general in California, Illinois and Connecticut brought fraud charges against Countrywide, the Wall Street Journal quoted a California law professor spelling out that if the states can persuade the courts to grant restitution, it could be a staggering blow against Countrywide, requiring it to give back its profit on all those loans and conceivably give back houses on which it has foreclosed. Financial fraud is a serious matter. The remedies have long been on the books.
MW: Is there a less radical way to keep people in homes which may be too expensive for their incomes or should we be looking for other alternatives?
Michael Hudson: The answer depends on how you define homes as being too expensive. If you're talking about the mortgage's interest-rate jumps and amortization payments being too high to be afforded, then one way to keep them there is a partial write-down of the mortgage loan. Treasury Secretary Paulson already has endorsed a step that remains market-based: to assess what a realistic market price for the property would be, and write down the mortgage to that price.
The problem comes from homes that are WAY too expensive. This might be the result of a sudden expensive health problem, in which case they probably will have to move, as the United States doesn't have European-style health insurance and prefers to blame the victim for having gotten sick or injured. But if the lender knowingly made a bad loan in the first place and the buyer does have to move because their income is insufficient to begin with, they should get some relocation compensation at the very least, and the full legal remedy for fraud at best.