According to Professor Margrit Kennedy, a stunning 35% to 40% of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take a 35% to 40% cut of our GDP. That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. Dr. Kennedy cites interest charges ranging from 12% for garbage collection, to 38% for drinking water to, 77% for rent in public housing in her native Germany. By 2010, 1% of the population owned 42% of financial wealth, while 80% of the population owned only 5% percent of financial wealth. Dr. Kennedy observes that the bottom 80% pay the hidden interest charges that the top 10% collect, making interest a strongly regressive tax that the poor pay to the rich.
Brown estimates that if we had a financial system that returned the interest collected from the public directly to the public, 35% could be lopped off the price of everything we buy. Brown does offer a hypothetical solution. She writes that “Direct reimbursement to the people is a hard system to work out, but… we could do it by turning the banks into public utilities and their profits into public assets. Profits would return to the public, either reducing taxes or increasing the availability of public services and infrastructure.”
Title: It’s the Interest, Stupid! Why Bankers Rule the World
Author: Ellen Brown
Publication Source: Globalresearch.com
Date of article: November 08, 2012
URL: http://www.globalresearch.ca/its-the-interest-stupid-why-bankers-rule-the-world/5311030
Student Researcher: Cooper Reynolds, Sonoma State University
Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips, Sonoma state University