A little bit of government is a good and necessary thing and taxation is the price we have to pay to get it.

Taxation is very much in the lime light at the moment.

One individual:

Hervé Falciani. In 2009 this Franco-Italian systems engineer for HSBC’s Swiss private bank handed over a list of more than 100,000 HSBC clients to the French Finance Minister at the time, Christine Lagarde.

HSBC’s Swiss banking arm helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets, doling out bundles of untraceable cash and advising clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, according to a huge cache of leaked secret bank account files.

Now you don’t have to be a raw prawn to know way most of us would avoid pay tax if we could.

“For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it,” Obama said.

Here is the real reason why we avoid paying Taxes, (apart from Governments spending billions on useless warheads, conducting iff proxies wars, and privatizing national resources for short-term profits)

By taking half of everything that people own in a year the earnings of the 2,654.4 hours of the first 110.6 days go to the government.

Then our earnings can finally be our own.

For every 8-hour workday, we labor for 2 hours and 26 minutes to pay government and local taxes. One hour and 7 minutes goes to corporate and personal income taxes.

Eliminating this tax on productive earnings would eliminate 46.24% of the tax burden.

It would also allow us to keep our finances private. We dedicate an average of 20 minutes of our labor to personal savings. It should be more like 1 hour and 12 minutes.

A total TOT +1.19% of 35 minutes of the 8-hour workday pays for Social Security and Medical Insurance.

If Social Security was privatized, instead of constantly decreasing benefits, personal retirement accounts would be over funded.

An additional 19 minutes goes to consumption taxes like excise and sales tax.

Some people suggest our country could operate on a “fair tax” of entirely sales taxes. But such a method of taxation has its own problems. Critics counter that a national sales tax is regressive, favoring the rich (although this depends on how you measure “rich”). They claim foreign companies would have an unfair advantage in the international market over their domestic counterparts.

Fifteen minutes of each workday goes to property taxes.

Even renters pay this tax as businesses and landlords pass the expense on to them.

Property taxes are highest for city dwellers because real estate assessments increase in proximity to a big city. Thus they tend to be a regressive tax, taxing the poor who live in relatively highly assessed areas and shop at stores with higher assessed buildings whose high property taxes trickle down into their prices.

For the price of property taxes, average workers could purchase all of their clothing. As it is, workers have to labor an extra 13 minutes to afford their clothes.

The final 9 minutes go to other state, federal and local taxes.

So how do we create a stronger, fairer, and more sustainable economic model in which the many and not just the few benefit from rising prosperity now and into the future?

Supplement wages for low-income workers

Increases the wages of low-income workers.

Progressive tax reform.

Payroll taxes are still sharply regressive.

Make housing cheaper.

Keep unemployment low to maintain worker bargaining power.

Deregulate copyright and patent law.

How can this be done in The European Union.

The euro zone debt crisis shows that something is seriously wrong with Europe.

But what is it?

The Euro zone is a heterogeneous federation of independent states, an area of ​​exchange where markets for goods, labor and financial assets are segmented by national boundaries and often scarcely competitive.

European nations have basically been moving apart for centuries, developing their own national languages and cultures.

So far, the organisation’s leaders seem to have shown little recognition of the inherent structural flaws of the currency, preferring instead to prop up failure.

Across much of the continent, the EU’s fatal lack of real popular consent may be catching up with it to the extent that it has actually amplified the differences in terms of income, unemployment, fiscal balances and public debt. The rules for budgetary discipline are imposed from the center and are ineffective, particularly in adverse economic conditions.

The crisis has also highlighted the inadequacy of European institutions and exposed their design faults. Public apathy towards the EU is also increasing, as citizens feel isolated from the institutions in Brussels and see no way to influence European level decisions.

The Euro zone federal budget is negligible and always balanced, so that the burden of macroeconomic stabilization falls on national budgets, which are defenseless against aggregate shocks.

Last but not least, it ultimately requires the Euro zone to move away from centralized system of ineffective and invasive rules towards a system of national ownership of budgetary discipline, combined with a binding no-bail-out commitment by European institutions.

In addition to the solvency risks for states and banks, the return to national currencies carries the risk of taking the continent back to an era of competitive devaluations, trade protectionism and retaliations.

The way to shed the Euro zone from the risk of disintegration is long and fraught with political obstacles. It requires each country to jump-start the path of structural reforms, to eliminate barriers to competition, contrasting rents of firms, trade unions and national banks; it requires Europe to gradually establish a federal budget and inter-state insurance scheme, devolving the proceeds and the administration of a tax base (VAT) to the center.

The integrity of the Euro zone ultimately depends on the political will of each
member state. The benefits of free movement of goods, persons and investments – the factors that could make the EU economy strong –could be at stake.

The mantra that price stability and fiscal responsibility, together with market-friendly micro economic reforms, will not put Europe back onto a path of rapid growth and restore full employment. Nor will Quantitative Easing have the desired effect.

The disintegration of the Euro area, will be quite dire.

Take the Forthcoming Elections in Spain, and the recent Election result in Greece

The Forthcoming disintegration of the UK political system and its promised referendum on staying in the EU.

If the UK votes to leave considering the amount of trade it does with the EU it will still have to follow most of its rules – while no longer having any role in setting them. Reducing social security provisions just when the need for them may be increasing hardly seems wise.

 “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an European; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”