The gap between the very richest and the rest of us is getting bigger.
Why?
A common belief is that it's good for us all if a small group of people earn an enormous
amount of money.
The theory is that their wealth trickles down to the rest of us.
But this is a myth.
In reality, money is sucked up from all of us in to the pockets of a very small group
of people.
How does this happen?
One reason is the way that money is created.
Right now, almost all of the money in our economy is created by banks when they make
loans.
Now most people assume that when banks make loans, they are lending out someone else's
savings.
But they are not.
Instead when somebody takes out a loan, banks create new money electronically, by typing
numbers in to their account.
97% of all of the money in our economy is created in this way, as people take out loans
from banks.
The more loans people take, the more debt there is, and the more money there is.
The shocking fact is that if nobody went into debt, there would be almost no money in the
economy.
Our economy depends on the electronic money created by banks.
But because the money is created when people borrow, someone, somewhere, has to pay interest
on every pound created.
In effect we are renting the money we need to run our economy from the banks.
This means that in the UK alone, together we pay the banks £192 million in interest
every single day.
And because the debt is held mostly by the bottom 90% and wealth mostly by the top 10%,
paying this interest transfers money from the bottom 90% of the population to the very
top 10%.
It sucks wealth and income from the rest of us up to the very lucky few.
So as long as we have to rent the money we use from the banks that create it, we'll have
to keep paying this huge interest bill, and the gap between the richest and the rest of
us will keep increasing.
But there are ways to create money that don't depend on us all going into debt to the banks.
We want to see money created by a public body and spent into the economy, so that we don't
have to borrow all of the money we need from banks.
This would lead to less debt, and stop the gap between the richest and the rest of us
getting even bigger.
This is what we're campaigning for.
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