HOW THE PLANNED TAXATION SCHEME AIMS AT A GENERAL IMPOVERISHMENT OF THE PEOPLE

We all know that just taxation means that every tax-paying Citizen must retain after tax a net income enough to guarantee a decent living, exactly as the Constitution dictates.

Decent living refers to a level of everyday life such that the Citizen is not forced to live through conditions from which the Penal Law provides protection: in other words, this level of everyday living must be devoid of undue emotional and psychological duress, conditions precipitating actions harmful to the Citizen due to uncontrollable circumstances in the environment of that Citizen. (If a Citizen causes such conditions to another party, he or she is liable to criminal persecution). In addition, his/her everyday living should guarantee self-respect, dignity and self-disposal so that to preclude further damage to personal dignity and self-respect.

In practice, this refers to the obligation on the part of the State to ensure that the Citizen will (after taxation) retain a net sizeable income able to cover all of that Citizen’s basic needs, any additional need accruing from that Citizen’s Rights and offer insurance that in case of an emergency need, there will be enough funds for this Citizen to take at least initial action in the face of such need.

The Constitution also decrees that the State has no right to enforce taxation beyond the capacity of the Citizen to pay, and that those Citizens who are economically more robust than others must contribute to the taxation scheme COMMENSURABLY. We come back, in other words, to the above description of what conditions should secure a decent net income to the Citizen.

The newly released taxation scheme to be set for approval and which is being continuously referred to and analyzed via the mass media, drafted by a government that have the audacity to self-define themselves as ‘socialist’ is NOT ONLY INHUMAN BUT ALSO TOTALLY IMBECILIC. Not only does it succeed in achieving utter destitution of all Citizens, from the base of the middle-class downwards, but it also precludes any revenue flow to the State coffers, condemning the State apparatus to economic stagnation and destruction.

In the series of small articles posted to substantiate our analysis, the two previous articles (which describe both what is to come as well as the type and quality of the persons responsible for its enforcement), we will put pen to paper to demonstrate to you the medieval, inhuman and tax-extracting system which they try to convince people to accept and obey, yoking him or her self to it like a medieval serf, forsaking the sum of his/her Rights that were there to protect his/her dignity as a Human Being and his/her Right to live as a Human Being.

Those will be short articles, because the extent of debauchery, affront and criminality witnessed and described cause much anger, which, in order to become constructive and not destructive, requires sharing and talking it over amongst our immediate cycles.

Let us now see, by putting pen to paper as we said, what the immediate taxation announced really means. This time we will calculate only the direct tax, not the indirect one, about which we will talk in our next article, while in the third article, we will also calculate the real total of the indirect taxation – and reveal the plain day robbery.

To begin with, and according to The Greek Consumer Centre, the ever-increasing cost of living for a family of four covering only electricity bills, water supply bills, groceries, clothing and petrol, forgetting all other expenditures, was for 2009 at about 1,700 Euros. Please keep in mind that this calculation does not include costs on health and education that cover decent level of services, and includes only the least possible costs incurred. In fact we can easily calculate that the real cost of life is actually higher and it incorporates additional everyday costs, such as cost of accommodation, both personal, family or work, for many Citizens, as well as a host of additional occupation-related costs (all the MPs receive allowances for all these, labelling them performance costs, which are paid separately from their main remuneration), as well as the cost of tax and dues, we shall see in a moment, as well as emergency costs

In fact we could very well say that the cost of living with each daily cost accounted for, providing for an added cost from the rising prices, owing to the financial speculation going on in the EU by bankers and the inflation they cause at this time and day, should be set at 3,000 minimum (with the prospect of only average quality of services in health, insurance bills of all kinds, cost of repairs and maintenance, shared bills, unaccounted for bills, as well as additional costs, such as legally enforced payments, loan and other debt payments, etc). For an average level of services and inclusion of all other cost-incurring parameters of daily life at a middle-class level, the cost of living rises immediately to 5,000 Euro per month (precisely, in other words, the amount which is presented by the ‘big-shot’ TV journalists whose monthly incomes rise up to tens of thousands of Euros, as the socially-provocative income level, provocative for only those Citizens who do not find themselves in the upper echelons of society and who lack a birth right to the hegemonic class).

Below please find a table which presents incomes up to 70,000 Euro per year along with the expected annual tax, and in brackets the net income available to the Citizen to face cost of living expenses, indirect taxation and other dues. In the second bracket we include the monthly income BEFORE TAXES that the taxpayer would have had if he/she had zero tax to pay. We do this breakdown to see how many tax levels, which are considered socially privileged and are supposedly targeted by the Inland Revenue Office, i.e., those in the government, big mass media owners, bankers, industrialists, large-scale capitalists, WILL END UP WITH ZERO OR NEGATIVE INCOME ONLY ON THE BASIS OF LIVING COSTS, EVEN IF THEY DID NOT HAVE TO PAY HIGHER TAX. APPLYING TAXES ON THESE (DECLARED) AMOUNTS REDUCES THEIR MONTHLY INCOME TO ONE WITH NEGATIVE SIGN, BY HUNDREDS OF EUROS PER MONTH.

Please be reminded that in the following calculation, we consider a base line of 3,000 Euros as the absolute lowest limit of monthly income required for a DECENT AND CONSTITUTIONALLY-CONGRUENT LIFE STYLE.

€ 12,000 (15%) = 1,000 direct tax [10,200 yearly after direct tax ] {income € 1000 per month BEFORE TAX }

€ 35,000 (35%) = 12,250 direct tax [22,750 yearly after direct tax ] {income € 2917 per month BEFORE TAX }

We see therefore that up to 35,000 Euro A FAMILY OF FOUR CANNOT LIVE AND ABLE TO COVER ALL ITS NEEDS ON ITS HOUSEHOLD INCOME BEFORE TAX. After tax, in fact every tax level is goes down by at least one or two levels, bringing along a dramatic cut in the household income of that family.

We can immediately see why there has been such a huge wave of bank loans by households and free professionals, own account workers, self-employed merchants who have used the loan money as capital to complement their household income. And this has taken place AFTER HOUSEHOLDS HAVE ALREADY LIMITED THEIR EXPENDITURE TO COVER THOSE COSTS THEY CANNOT BUT PAY, such as utility bills, accommodation rent, food, children’s schooling, medical and medicine bills, job-related expenses but sometimes not even all of the above. In fact, taxation takes away the ability of the average Citizen of the above yearly incomes, to stay away from bank loans, since that Citizen has already made these cuts.

It is a matter of time for all those households falling under the above income levels to find themselves defending their property from the banks and the State, if of course by now, there has been any such property left to them.

Below are the few remaining tax or income levels that may still confer some capacity to earners to make ends meet and you will see that the incomes that are presented belong to the middle and upper middle levels. Please note that our discussion is based on averages and not on the extreme cases that by their nature are short-lived (very often income falls towards the mean or rises up to the mean) and are the product of particular causes that affect these incomes differently.

€ 40,000 (35%) = 14,500 direct tax [26,500 yearly after direct tax ] {income € 3333 per month BEFORE TAX}

€ 90.000 ( 40% ) = 36.000 direct tax [ 54.000 yearly after direct tax ] { income € 7.500 / per month BEFORE TAX}

For all incomes over the 50,000 Euro limit, taxation is a flat 40% for everyone even if their income comes to many hundreds of thousands of Euros, even millions or billions annually. HERE LIES THE PROOF THAT THE SO-CALLED SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT IS A RIGHTIST OLIGARCHY THAT FAVOURS HIGH INCOMES WHILE IT PENALIZES THE LOWER ONES.

The mechanism works just as in the case of indirect taxes, in other words, with a fixed percent taxed off at each income, the lower incomes suffer a disproportionate loss via taxation as compared to the higher incomes. Please look at the Table in the first bracket where we have put the net income after taxation. With every rising income level, there is an actual subsidy of several, and later hundreds of thousands, of Euro THE RICHER ONE GETS.

€ 1.000.000.000 ( 40%) = 400.000.000 direct tax [ 600.000.000 yearly after direct tax ] { 83.333.333 / per month BEFORE TAX}

In case you are wondering what kind of people earn such high incomes, we shall answer that not only do the bankers and shipowners make this kind of money but also the simple propagandistic anchormen and anchorwomen (such as Mara Zacharea who declared around 400,000 Euros yearly income, that is 33,000 per month, two years back), as well as everyone else who is holder of a key position as a ‘salaried’ employee in a State , multinational or mass media corporation, NGO officer, investor or high bank officer (that is, he/she is a holder of a position the actions of which affect the direction, actions and future of a part or of the whole of the People, including his or her consumer and political behavior) earns such high incomes, not including bonuses and other perks.

The same of course holds for government officials and MPs (as for example the Bakogiannis-Kouvelis couple, who declared about 1,500,000 Euro income two years ago, apart from income coming from additional sources, such as immovable property holdings, stocks and bonds and other investments).

And if we see the total of the tax scale, from the first class, (12,000 Euro yearly) and up, we shall see that the ‘fair’ tax system penalizes low incomes and promotes high incomes, making everyone who earns less than 50,000 Euro per year to slide downwards to a lower social class because of taxation only, to be lead to bank loans and to be forced to miss payments of loans and dues and thus become defaulted to the banks and the State. He is also forced to resign from offering his/her children and family the basic amenities accorded to the middle class (a good school, good professional training, good medicare, financial security, etc) and of course, TO STOP HAVING ANY PURCHASING POWER, A FACT THAT EXTERMINATES HIM/HER PROFESSIONALLY AS MUCH AS IT DOES THE REST OF HIS/HER FELLOW PROFESSIONALS.

But at and above the 150,000 Euro yearly income, the taxation system promotes the richer, WHEN HE/SHE CAN BE BROUGHT TO PAY TAXES, BECAUSE THE RICHER ONE IS, THE MORE THE TAX EXEMPTIONS THAT HAVE BEEN SET UP IN FAVOR OF THAT INCOMES ARE, ON TOP OF THE VERY STEEP SUBSIDIES AND ‘INCENTIVES’ THAT THE OTHER INCOME GROUPS NEVER QUALIFY FOR.

A just tax scale, as we shall see upon completion of our analysis (i.e., our third article) would be based on the inverse logic, avoiding penalizing the economically weaker and relying on the economically stronger to help in times of emergency need of the State.

Only in this way can we achieve a redistribution that favors the People. Because so far what we have seen is a relentless redistribution in favor of the wealthy.

A simple example will suffice: the amount of 900,000,000 Euro sought after by the aristocratically-bred G. Papakonstantinou (as we saw in our last article, and who was trained to do just that redistribution of wealth in favor of the rich) aiming to collect it from the 30,000 yearly income category, straggling in the process around 90,000 families, could be collected by taxing just 7,500 investors, big-shot journalists and managing directors whose yearly incomes are at 300,000 per year, or 3 banks making super-profits in excess of many billions. Or perhaps just one of them.

Translation provided by Michael T.