Transcript of the above video:

As the title suggests, we are talking about the notion of taxes on a global scale. Now we have been talking a lot about taxation here in Thailand. This new Government recently came in and they seem to be quite eager to expand the tax base, to use the sort of legalese, the parlance of tax bureaucracy. At the end of the day I think what that means is the Government wants money! Well I can see why they want money because their tax base was shrunken quite considerably from the fact that the Government made the entire economy shut down for two and a half years; not a lot of money going around and not a lot of money to be taxed when you tell people they can't work, force them to stay in their homes and basically freak them out to the point that they can't basically operate a going economy. In the aftermath of this I have noticed there seems to be this sort of push to just, I mean to make Tax Authorities so overbearing that it's just crazy to me.  

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Thai Examiner, that is thaiexaminer.com. As per usual, Thai Examiner is very thorough on this topic. I urge those who are watching this video, go check out that article, but I am going to quote a small excerpt here. Quoting directly: "Mr Kitipong compared the attitude reflected in the new Revenue Order to the United States policy on income tax, which is that tax collection should be operated on a global principle." Well let's be clear, that isn't US Policy. The United States does have tax policies pertaining to their domestic tax base and I think what they are conflating here is the notion of taxation on worldwide income which I don't think a lot of people really understand. And to just kind of drill down on this, when you go back in US history when America was founded, We the people became effectively joint in several sovereigns in a sense of the United States. We the people are the underlying sovereign of the United States. There is also State and Federal sovereigns but as noted in the 9th and 10th Amendments there are “the states and the people respectively” to quote the 10th amendment. So it is not United States’ policy, it's the government's policy to tax the citizenry based on the national debt and again I can go into deep detail here but sort of the tax assessment service, the Internal Revenue Service is sort of inexorably or inextricably linked to the Federal Reserve effectively. And the Federal Reserve is the mechanism by which the United States not only creates currency but it is essentially the, if you will, I don't mean to use sort of hyperbolic language but it is sort of the banking cartel if you will, they having monopoly on being able to lend money to the United States, so to We the People. So in the American System, the United States, We the People go into debt via our Congress, our Representatives in Congress and then the Internal Revenue Service they basically work to get that debt repaid by taxing the citizenry according to the law, relevant tax law.

Okay so let's put that where it is. Unlike many other countries, the people of the United States are in my opinion, unfortunately taxed on their worldwide income because again We the People are the underlying sovereign who go into the national debt, who then need to pay it back. It's not a global principle. If anything, it is actually very much a local principle but it ends up being applied globally because Americans can move wherever they want to live but they still have certain tax obligations by dint of their American citizenship. Now reasonable people can massively disagree on that; I don't want to get into a big debate over whether taxes are right or wrong. But one thing I have noticed is there seems to have been this push in the last couple years, this notion of a “Global Tax” and “we don't want anyone hiding” and I even noticed the PM at one point here in Thailand said something akin to "everybody has to effectively be taxed". Well that has never been the principle that has under lied the how do we want to call it, the rules-based international order post World War II regarding tax. People have basic human rights. People have a right to earn their income. Now I am not saying it is illegitimate if you are earning an income in a given jurisdiction and they have certain tax laws that you have to pay their taxes, but it is not an inherent obligation just by dint of being human that you have to pay taxes to someone. Now again, there is a difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion. Again if you earn money or you accrue capital in a given jurisdiction that has certain tax laws yes you need to adhere to those, but there's not some universal transcendental rule out there that if you earn money you must be taxed on it. No that has never been the case and I think people conflate that when they look at and analyze the American tax system and they look at sort of the modern world as we take it in at the moment and they make this conflation and then we get to quotes like these, "operated on a global principle". No there is no Global Tax. I view this as very much akin to the misnomer "International Law". There is no International Law. There are laws that are adopted by dint of Treaty that two or more parties i.e. sovereign nations under the Westphalian notion of sovereignty have contracted with each other and arising therefrom you may have a body of law that applies internationally, but there is no International Law that's just free-standing per se, just as there is no Global principle of taxation free-standing per se.