(WSJ News) Get ready to pay the bank a fee, and the government a tax, just for the honor of having a high-risk bank account that pays you nothing.
The United States now regards your bank account as an asset that, in effect, belongs to your bank and can be seized by the government to pay bank debts and obligations.
As we document in Don’t Bank On It! The Unsafe World of 21st Century Banking, the bank we used to trust to safeguard our money has become one of the riskiest places to put it.
A precedent was set for seizing bank accounts under the “bail in” doctrine in Cyprus, where people awoke one March 2013 morning to find their banks locked and ATM access to their accounts shut down. President Obama has embraced such bail ins.
Now, we have a similar new legal precedent being set in Australia for taxing your bank accounts….for your protection, of course. America might quickly adopt this, too.
A circular cage is being built through which you will be taxed when you earn your money, spend your money, invest your money, and possibly (very soon) save your money.
You are already losing money every day that you have a bank account paying less in interest than you are losing to inflation, a deceptive form of taxation.
Get ready in the near future to pay the bank a fee, and the government a tax, just for the honor of having a high-risk bank account that pays you nothing.
Taxing Bank Deposits Near-zero bank interest has meant near-zero taxes on our savings – until now.
A new political scheme to tax bank accounts, according to the Australian Financial Review, might be locked in place in Australian banks as soon as January 1, 2016. [1-4] This could quickly be copied by other tax-hungry welfare states, including ours.
This bank deposit tax will likely begin at a low percentage, to create a legal precedent; but it is expected to grow rapidly, as the income tax did in the United States.
Like many modern taxes, this planned tax on bank accounts is being framed as a tax on the banks, not on individual customers. Its cost, however, will be passed on to depositors in the form of higher fees or lower interest paid on their accounts.
This tax on bank deposits is projected from its start to raise around $500 million each year, purportedly for a “Financial Stabilization Fund” to help protect banks from collapse in future financial crises.
In the United States, such designated taxes are often diverted to fund other politician wishes. Hundreds of billions in gasoline taxes went to the Highway Trust Fund, then was shifted elsewhere by the same politicians who complain that “our highway infrastructure urgently needs more spending.” Such politicians even looted $2.66 trillion from the Social Security trust fund, leaving behind only I.O.U.s that must be paid for with ever-heavier taxes on future generations or the denial of benefits to today’s older generations.
Truth be told, our spendaholic politicians loot whatever pools of public or private money they can grab to pay for their out-of-control spending addict.
