So what do we want?

Who said I ever thought that MaizieD?
Only you
Your posts are very rude and entirely untruthful.

All I can assume is, that when I asked questions or suggested you could explain something, you are unable to answer.

At least other posters can give a civilised answer.

I echo what other posters have said - that they would be happy to pay more tax - which would mean everyone who is a tax payer.

GG2 and Annie were discussing a very specific case. You appeared to be joining their discussion so I (and, I think GG2) assumed that your comment about expecting them to pay more income tax applied to the specific person being discussed.

As the 'other posters who would be happy to pay more tax' have no influence whatsoever over the rates of tax they, or anyone else, pays I don't quite see where your comment fits into the conversation. But what do I know

Your posts are very rude and entirely untruthful.

And yours (and other peoples) are very frustrating when you don't address the question.

I'd like to know what is untruthful, though.

So What Do We Want was the question

Everyone agrees that we want what is in the OP and posters said they would be happy to pay more tax for that reason.
Some posters think that there should be a limit on what we want provided by the state and I wondered if we should expect someone on a low wage to pay more tax or not towards services which some may consider non-essential such as free school dinners for all and free individual music lessons/instruments for all pupils.

But you obviously know the answer better than I do and I did ask you to explain it but you just keep demanding that posters answer it instead.

All I can assume is, that when I asked questions or suggested you could explain something, you are unable to answer.

I am perfectly able to answer my own question, 'how is money created' but all it would produce would be a load of irrelevant objections to 'economists'. I just hoped that it might set people thinking about how all this money magically appears in circulation.

Do you 'get' the logic of that?
[sigh]

I'd like to know what is untruthful, though
It is futile to ask jalima, or anyone who believes in the 'national economy is the same as a household economy' myth,

I've never said that and I do not think that, therefore it is either untruthful or else a result of a vivid imagination.

Sorry, jalima.
Just google taxresearch. It works.
There's a very good post called it's time to shake the people's QE money tree, about the green new deal.

www.financeforthefuture.com/GreenQuEasing.pdf

Thanks djen, I will take a look some time soon, off to bed now!

I will also ask DN when I speak to her as she will probably be able to explain it all very well and in words of one syllable for an idiot like me who thinks that the national economy is run like a household budget.
Not.

The issue of universal benefits is one that has always been argued about. Child benefit for example was viewed by some as being unnecessary for the rich. One of the arguments at the time was that it was a benefit paid to the mother of the child, who might, when men controlled the household budget, be short of money even though the father was well paid. As we have now moved, on one of the arguments for free meals and free music lessons could be that it directly benefits the child, and that all children deserve the right regardless of their family circumstances. Any targeting of the such benefits does of course involve means testing which is not only expensive but also means that some people would miss out either because they chose not to or failed for some reason to fill in the correct forms.
I refuse to join the argument about if we can afford such things we are a rich country, austerity was the biggest con ever inflicted on the British public

The logic of this thread seems to have gone off at a very unhelpful tangent.

Some of you have decided that everyone wants the items in the OP. This is poor research but an arguing point you could go with but please, on a basis that 'if' everyone wanted the items on the OP list then ...

Some then seem then to have decided to think about how to pay for this. Some of the posters have decided they need not take universally majority agreed economic theories into account - they know better.

Very much the same group of posters then use the logic we were taught is misleading in school - the Jack is a donkey logic. It goes

Jack likes carrots
Donkeys like carrots
Therefore Jack is a donkey

In this thread people have become side-tracked by low income tax payers so they are saying:

People on low incomes pay tax
Tax is needed to pay for the things 'everyone' wants
Therefore people on low incomes will pay for the things everyone wants.

This is simply not logical. There are many 'progressive' ways of taking tax - which is exactly what - as Annie brought it in - the LP costings showed for their manifesto.

However, surely if you are deciding how to budget for the things you have decided you want you should be working out the way to raise the money or prioritise the use of the money all ready raised. If you, within this debate, do not want the low paid to pay increased taxes the work out how thing can and may be paid for!

I will offer my personal opinion about part of the way of getting the things 'everyone' wants. I believe, as long as it was progressive (low earners paying less and high earners more) and hypothecated, many low earners would be prepared to pay, throughout their working lives, NI for the in-work and end of work (pension) benefits and a similar insurance for health and care throughout their lives. It would have to be low for the very low paid but I believe people would be prepared to pay for this - if governments could only use it for these specific items.

If this is taken out of the general taxation most of it currently comes from, on paper we should see a reduction in tax and about a 1% reduction in NI. There should or could be a drop in tax rates too. Governments of all colours have played with the NHS and said we could not afford or we must afford various things - because the funding is not clear. With an hypothecated tax they could not do this.

You then have a much smaller issue of how you want to spend the rest of the taxes and what tax you are prepared to raise and how.

If you are going to use any of the suggested costings by parties as examples then please be fair an put forward what they have actually suggested - I believe all parties have some good ideas.

trisher and of course, means testing could be seen as demeaning. So what is the answer?

The OP asked if we wanted an effective and efficient free NHS and I answered that yes, we do - but had reservations about some areas which are perhaps not as efficient as they could be and therefore cost more than they should.

Yes to everything in the OP run in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
However, how they should be operated is the thorny problem because often, if run by the state, they become cumbersome and inefficient, if hived off to private enterprise they can often be run more efficiently but corners could be cut in order to chase profits; the country could become a patchwork of discrete groups such as the railway system is at present and schools are increasingly so.

I will offer my personal opinion about part of the way of getting the things 'everyone' wants. I believe, as long as it was progressive (low earners paying less and high earners more) and hypothecated, many low earners would be prepared to pay, throughout their working lives, NI for the in-work and end of work (pension) benefits and a similar insurance for health and care throughout their lives. It would have to be low for the very low paid but I believe people would be prepared to pay for this - if governments could only use it for these specific items.
I agree with that, it's a point I have made before but that sums it up very well.

People do assume that their pension has been 'paid for' as they have paid NI all their working lives and that there is a pot at the end as there is for a private pension. I suppose paying 'the full stamp' and the pension being dependent on the number of years paid would lead one to reach that conclusion - however, the number of years of payment required varies quite widely as ideas about state pensions change.

Another instance which is non-hypothecated is VED and fuel duty - it goes into the general tax fund which is not all allocated specifically to road maintenance, building or infrastructure such as bridges - which is fairly obvious judging by the state of the roads at present.

Money is a man-made construct, invented as a substitute for and a representative of time and work. There is as much money as whoever issues it decides, but the value of it, and how much work and time it represents, depends on the relationship between how much there is and how much time and work are represented.

I am sure someone else can answer the more modern side of this question better than me, but the historic side of "Where does money come from" goes something like this.

Once upon a time, many centuries ago, no-one had any money. Everyone lived in families or small groups, hunted or foraged for food, made a shelter from whatever they could, and made warm clothes from the skins of the animals they had eaten. The children and the old and sick received food from those who could hunt or forage, but as soon as they were able, children joined in first the foraging, then the hunt. When food was plentiful, everyone ate well, when it was scarce, they didn't and the very young and the old and sick died. If it was possible, surplus food was stored for the famine months. In a small community, everyone knew everyone else and was aware that if they shared their food when they had it, others would share what they had too, and they would all benefit.

Later, some people specialised in one particular skill - making arrow-heads for hunting, weaving cloth. While they were doing these things, they were less able to hunt for their pown food. Those who needed arrow-heads or cloth shared their food with the artisan. Travelling tool-makers exchanged their goods for board and lodging. Certain individuals were very good at singing and telling stories. They travelled from one place to another, and were welcomed for their tales and music, and as visitors were fed well in return, before they moved on.

As communities became larger, specialisation became more common, until there were people who never hunted or foraged at all, but whose own skills supported them when exchanged for food or the products of the skills of others. The whole trade system grew more and more intricate, with an "exchange rate" emerging for the equivalent value of, say, a cloak against a stone axe against free food for the winter. With the arrival of the even more specialised skills of metal-working (which was usually treated as a secret magic, and the workers as wonder-workers) the different values of different products became even more pronounced.

In several places, a system of symbols was invented. Something rare and hard to find came to represent a certain value of barter. Cowrie shells, for instance, were not very common, were small, easily recognised, impossible to forge or adulterate, and could be stored away when not needed to pay for something, unlike a spare joint of venison. Gold and silver ornamental jewellery could be broken up and exchanged for goods or services.

The usefulness of these symbols was their rarity, and their significance was that they were indeed symbolic.

If there were only two hundred cowrie shells in existence in the area, then the value in shells there of any artifact or service could only be the proportion of that two hundred that the atrifact or service represented in relation to everything else that could be bought there. Someone finding a hundred more cowrie shells on the beach might feel briefly as rich as Croesus, but he couldn't buy any more with it than the area produced - and he would find that if there was no more of it there to buy the price of everything went up and the value of each shell went down. He could give some of it to the poor and disadvantaged, but the prices and values would have changed for them, too, so they could end up even worse off than before his generosity.

Elegran


(although some words were more than one syllable)

think-left.org/2015/08/20/margaret-thatchers-biscuit-tin-and-austerity/

'Money is a tool by which goods can be shared around ensuring management of resources, rewards for labour and supply, and trade. Money doesn’t originate from the taxpayer. It comes from the government spending. The US dollar and the UK pound are sovereign monetary systems under control of their respective nations.

Neoliberal economics have led to the greatest inequalities in human history, based on the mystique, that market forces will adjust to give the best possible outcomes.

Considering the unhappiness, poverty, and isolation, in what sense is the current state of the UK, the best of all possible worlds?'

From that article. The rest of it needs to be read, too.

Jalima But none of them difficult or jargon.

I am waiting for someone to continue my story with the progression toward money as a measure in itself without reference to time spent or work done and dependent for its value entirely on what the government of the day says it is worth.

I wonder too how to factor in the taking or sending large amounts of it abroad to other places (foreign holidays, buying internationally), and increasing their stock of it (and of the things it can be spent on), and hope that someone is working hard on how to get more of it spent here by other nations, to increase our stock of it.

The Invention of Banking and Coinage
The invention of banking preceded that of coinage. Banking originated in Ancient Mesopotamia where the royal palaces and temples provided secure places for the safe-keeping of grain and other commodities. Receipts came to be used for transfers not only to the original depositors but also to third parties. Eventually private houses in Mesopotamia also got involved in these banking operations and laws regulating them were included in the code of Hammurabi. In Egypt too the centralization of harvests in state warehouses also led to the development of a
system of banking. Written orders for the withdrawal of separate lots of grain by owners whose crops had been deposited there for safety and convenience, or which had been compulsorily deposited to the credit of the king, soon became used as a more general method of payment of debts to other persons including tax gatherers, priests and traders. Even after the introduction of coinage these Egyptian grain banks served to reduce the need for precious metals which tended
to be reserved for foreign purchases, particularly in connection with military activities.
Precious metals, in weighed quantities, were a common form of money in ancient times. The transition to quantities that could be counted rather than weighed came gradually. On page 29 of
A History of Money Glyn Davies points out that the words "spend", "expenditure", and "pound" (as in the main British monetary unit) all come from the Latin "expendere" meaning "to weigh". On page 74 the author points out that the basic unit of weight in the Greek speaking world was the "drachma" or "handful" of grain, but the precise weight taken to represent this varied considerably, for example from less than 3 grams in Corinth to more than 6 grams in Aegina.
Throughout much of the ancient world the basic unit of money was the stater, meaning literally "balancer" or "weigher". The talent is a monetary unit with which we are familiar with from the Parable of the Talents in the Bible. The talent was also a Greek unit of weight, about 60 pounds. Many primitive forms of money were counted just like coins. Cowrie shells, obtained from some islands in the Indian Ocean, were a very widely used primitive form of money - in fact they were still in use in some parts of the world (such as Nigeria) within living memory. "So important a role did the cowrie play as money in ancient China that its pictograph was adopted in their written language for 'money'." (page 36) Thus it is not surprising that among the earliest countable metallic money or "coins" were "cowries" made of bronze or copper, in China.
In addition to these metal "cowries" the Chinese also produced "coins" in the form of other objects that had long been accepted in their society as money e.g. spades, hoes, and knives.
Although there is some dispute over exactly when these developments first took place, the Chinese tool currencies were in general use at about the same time as the earliest European coins and there have been claims that their origins may have been much earlier, possibly as early as the end of the second millennium BC. The use of tool coins developed (presumably independently) in the West. The ancient Greeks used iron nails as coins, while Julius Caesar regarded the fact that the ancient Britons used sword blades as coins as a sign of their backwardness. (However the Britons did also mint true coins before they were conquered by the Romans).
These quasi-coins were all easy to counterfeit and, being made of base metals, of low intrinsic worth and thus not convenient for expensive purchases.
True coinage developed in Asia Minor as a result of the practice of the Lydians, of stamping small round pieces of precious metals as a guarantee of their purity. Later, when their metallurgical skills improved and these pieces became more regular in form and weight the seals served as a symbol of both purity and weight. The use of coins spread quickly from Lydia to Ionia, mainland Greece, and Persia.

193.6.12.228/uigtk/uipz/hallgatoi/Origins%20of%20Money%20and%20of%20Banking.pdf

Elegran It's the next chapter where it gets interesting and complicated. I have a book at home by Jonathan Portes in Noddy language and I'll try to summarise some of it when I get a chance.

However, here's a little anecdote:

Before the last two Christmases I've made a bit of money by selling Lego (as I've explained before).

I've done it by buying Lego from Argos, Tesco, Amazon and a few other outlets, who sell at discounted rates. I buy using my credit card, thus creating non-existent money.

I then sell it, making a profit, and pay back my credit card before any interest is due, so have never invested any of my own money.

The government can do that on a huge scale, because it gets back the money it creates in the form of taxes.

It's a lot more complicated than that with spending on a national scale, but essentially it's the same.

PS. It only worked for me, because I wasn't a taxpayer. Unfortunately (well fortunately really), my income is now over the tax threshold and it wouldn't be worth it - don't want anybody accusing me again of not paying my taxes.

Are we just finding more articles, etc., or are they being published because the breaks of what appeared to be the status quo are off Jen?

The government can do that on a huge scale, because it gets back the money it creates in the form of taxes.

Thanks for that dd. That is the point which is so important to understand. That it is the government which creates the money to pay for services, investment in infrastructure etc. Not our taxes.

I wonder too how to factor in the taking or sending large amounts of it abroad to other places (foreign holidays, buying internationally), and increasing their stock of it (and of the things it can be spent on), and hope that someone is working hard on how to get more of it spent here by other nations, to increase our stock of it.

I think this is the cause of the shock from which we still don't seem to have recovered. Because, of course, when we had an Empire (which really originated through trade in at least the 17th century) we were getting all (well, the lion's share) of the money in Britain as we bought the Empire resources cheaply and sold back to the Empire at a profit.

Now that Globalisation and the flow of imports and exports has changed our effortless acquisition of money I think we're struggling a bit to replace the Empire. Of course, belonging to the EU has helped us massively with an easily accessed, trade barrier free market on our doorstep but so much of our trade is skewed towards the EU that losing a large part of it will damage our economy to a great extent. The government may well be able to 'create' money but if a large part of it is leaching out on the purchase of imports and not much replaced with income from exports we do have a problem. As Elegran says...

And the other thing to factor in is the amount of money which leaches out to tax havens so that the government is not getting back as much of the money it creates in taxes as it ought to.

It's very complex. That's why economists have different views on how to 'manage' a national economy. But where the money is 'created' is simple.