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Yet again we are talking about taxes here although in this one, I'm not really making this video from looking at the standpoint of perspective of foreigners here in Thailand but more from the perspective of what I am worried about for Thai folks here. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Expats in Thailand should stop worrying about negative income tax. First of all Negative Income Tax is sort of a Friedman-ian way of simply saying UBI, Universal Basic Income, okay? And it's also basically a feint to get people into the Tax System and frankly people that don't need to be there, okay. All these people out there that will be like, "well everybody has got to pay tax." Who said? I mean I'm tired of that. Yeah I do believe in reasonable, there is always the need for certain reasonable taxes but one thing I've loved about Thailand is it knows the balance and if you overly tax people or you scare the daylights out of people about being taxed, it is going to have a detrimental impact on your economy. A perfect example of this is JFK - a Democrat by the way, an American Democrat in America - lowered taxes during this term because he knew it would increase economic activity and be a benefit overall and would actually result in more tax revenue. If you're increasing economic activity and the tax rate remains the same, you'll get more money, and people will actually be kind of happy to pay it if for no other reason than it facilitates doing business. It's like "oh I know that's a flat rate," whatever. It's like the VAT here, people pay the VAT. You don't hear people like up in arms about VAT. They know what it is, it's systemic, it's systematic, boom, they pay it, they move on. It's not sitting around like "oh well now you need to be in a tax system". No, you just pay it when you buy something. Quoting directly: "Another name for NIT is "workfare." I would say another name for NIT is Commie gobbledygook! Quoting further: "All Thai citizens earning one baht or more in a year would be required to register with the Thai Revenue Department and fill in an annual tax form." Well neat! So now you're going to make people do a bunch of work they shouldn't otherwise do and they didn't need to do before, even though they may not actually owe anything. Again, and it's just pulling them into the tax system and they weren't in there before. And again, I need to be really clear. This is people that are not necessarily at subsistence levels, but they are very much living hand to mouth. I mean they're making their money on the street oftentimes: Street vendors and things of this nature. We don't all need to be pulled into some totalitarian Tax System. Let those people make their money, get on with their lives. They are paying into the Tax System one way or the other. I mean you do have to pay VAT at the end of the day, so what are you talking about? People in a way are already in the Tax System. Oh but they're not in the "nanny minder tax system" where they make you do homework every year for no good reason and then they pull you into this system and tell you what to do and Track and Trace everything. Oh, but you're not in that one; that's the one they want you in. Quoting further: "So for the first time, low-income street vendors, massage workers etc., would be required to be part of the tax system." Yeah exactly. Again, sounds like socialist gobbledygook, and remember what Stalin said. “Communism is Socialism in a hurry”. Well this is being brought in incrementally, you see what I'm saying? We're on the spectrum if we go down this road. We are on the spectrum toward communism. That's not hyperbole here. I mean when you're listening to the WEF telling you that you're going to own nothing and be happy. What does that sound like? Quoting further: "NIT means that once their income rises above the Government stipulated level, they will become taxpayers and not tax beneficiaries." Well first of all none if these people want to be tax beneficiaries, they just want to live their lives and work and earn their living by the sweat of their own brow and be left alone which in my mind, I thought that was the point of being Thai. That is why Thai vendors exist and things because that's how it is here; it's the land of the free. You want to go out and sell pineapple? If you can sell so much pineapple you become a millionaire off of it, I think great, that's part of being Thai. That's what I love about this country. Then meanwhile, "government stipulated level of income"! If I've never heard anything else that comes straight from the Soviet Union, it's that. That is the most Soviet thing I've heard since Gorbachev said no más Christmas Day 1991, okay that because that's what it is. The Government telling you how much money you can make. That's about as commie gobbledygook as you get. Quoting further: "Thus the real purpose of NIT over time is to increase the number of taxpayers in Thailand from less than 30% to a near 100%." I remember hearing somebody podcasting about talking to some of these technocrats out there in the world, and them thinking that if everything went digital, they would get even more taxes when the reality is if everything goes digital, we'll be living in a moribund economy not unlike the Soviet Union where nothing really gets done. We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us and then everybody just moves over to a black market or a gray market or moves into crypto or gold or various other means of exchanges and barters or alternate mechanisms of fund exchange, Capital exchange. They'll just move to something else and the Government won't get anything. How about backing off of this nonsense and just continuing to assess taxes as you have been? Yeah, you've hit a short fall. Guess what? You didn't care about any of us little people when we hit a shortfall because we couldn't do any work for 2 ½ years because of some nonsense pandemic that some communist Tedros, and the WHO told us we all had to shut down for. Nobody cared about us then. Now you're going to have to go through a little bit of a pinch and frankly after we get through the next high season, I think it won't even be an issue, but they're still trying to impose this Neo-Communist totalitarianism nonetheless. 

That said, quoting further: "For example an unemployed person who gets a job, would sooner or later earn a salary big enough to make him or her a taxpayer. Yeah, but they are already registered in the system so they are in a totalitarian system from the get-go, and by the way, that same phenomenon would occur if they were in the current system. At a certain point you make such a salary that you're paying some tax on it and presently if you're under a certain amount of income, you don't pay anything. As noted, 70% of the people aren't in the system. I would love to poll those 70% of Thais to ask them "do you really want to be in this system?" I am betting the answer is no. Quoting further: "The Finance Ministry believes that the demographic time bomb,"-  here we go with the WEF and the technocratic globalist sort of memetic phrases, the buzz words; what was it Lenin said? We shall win by slogans! Every time you hear these buzz words, “demographic time bomb”, that was like when they were trying to convince the Americans to go in the Iraq War, - what was it they called it, “we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”, that kind of nonsense. These are the kind of phrases you hear when they're trying to BS you into something that isn't in your interest. I'm hoping the people of Thailand get that and sort of operate accordingly.

That said, quoting again: "The Finance Ministry believes that the demographic time bomb - not enough babies being born - will mean that Social Security payments to the elderly need to be offset by widening income tax participation." Well first of all, the whole notion that we were having too many babies was one of these globalist notions to begin with and that's what resulted in the programs of decreasing the number of births and then everybody had a panic attack and realized that was a terrible idea. Meanwhile another thing to bear in mind is the Social Security System here in Thailand, as we have discussed in our other videos and has been in the press recently, is already like semi defunct. I always love the bureaucrat sort of thinking where "oh hey government intervention and bureaucracy didn't work, what's the solution? More government intervention and bureaucracy, that will fix it!" Come on! Meanwhile, this whole birth dearth thing here in Thailand is a real red herring in my mind; it's very much nonsensical. Why? Because Thailand is importing hundreds if not thousands of workers from the neighbouring countries that are not in such a socioeconomically advantageous position as Thailand; those folks are coming here to Thailand and working here and participating in the economy here. That's offsetting the problems - and I will admit there are some issues with aging in Thai Society - that will take care of that problem. More Government bureaucracy and more taxes and putting every single Thai into the tax system, that ain't the solution. We are importing workers and quite honestly, unlike workers - the situation in the United States being what it is and the situation that's happened over the last 10 years in Europe being what they are - put that aside, let's talk about reasonable good Immigration, I'll call it that, not invasion to use a term my friend Michael Yon sometimes brings up, but again bringing new people into the economy is not necessarily a bad thing and that's what Thailand is doing. We have got a lot of folks coming in from Myanmar; we have got a lot of folks that come in from Laos and Cambodia that fill the gaps created by this demography problem in Thailand and those people become upwardly more mobile, more so than even oftentimes in their home countries because of the opportunities afforded by Thailand. It's a win-win scenario and it's one that again these globalist technocrats refuse to take into their calculation because it operates against their logic that what we need is 100% of people in the tax system all traced, surveilled, and I'm sure they would love to have us bring in the Digital Wallet token so all of our transactions are traced and surveilled so that basically they can just have their totalitarian Utopia. Well it's not going to be a Utopia, it's going to look a lot like the Soviet Union. Gulag archipelago - we've seen that in history - I don't know why these people can't figure that out but here we are. 

That said, quoting further: "Thailand is on the verge of becoming a super age Society." Not really, not really. That is a little bit of hyperbole there, I think. Yes, Thailand is aging but Thailand is dealing with that; it's bringing in migrant labour to fill the shortfalls it has, and quite honestly, for all of the prognostications of Doom and for all the talk of how terrible Thailand is - and I've heard this for 17 years - the Western press is especially bad about this. Always negative news about how Thailand's doing. Meanwhile Thailand just keeps ticking up that chart, just keeps ticking up those economy boxes. Yeah, Thailand is so moribund, why are we having a problem weakening our currency right now? Why are we having a problem with the Thai baht strengthening so much? Is it because everybody is rushing in here because of the good things they see happening in Thailand? Could it be because we are seeing migrant labour coming in here participating in our economy, creating value, creating goods and services that other people around the world want to buy? Yeah, it probably is coming from that. Yes, is the ethnic Thai population, is there something of a demographic warping happening here? Yes, this happens throughout history in kind of cycles. Here in Thailand, I think it's not going to be that bad because the folks that are in the surrounding areas that are coming in, that are filling the gaps in the economy, are very much assimilating into Thai Society. Slowly but surely, those folks are indeed assimilating into Thai Society.

So again, my point being is even the demographic argument I don't think is very relevant frankly. I don't think it carries a lot of weight because again for the reasons I've just mentioned and again to go ahead and pull in this totalitarian surveillance and everybody going into this digital tax system, again that's not the answer to the problem. Quite frankly I would argue that the so-called "problem" they are coming up with here - much like the "economic downturn" that requires the "digital wallet token" was kind of a misnomer especially in light of the fact that in quarter one of 2024 we saw the biggest increase quarter on quarter in consumer spending that I think we saw in any economy at that time around the world. On top of it, our currency is increasing; it's getting stronger. If things were going so bad in Thailand, people would not be demanding our currency, okay? So that coupled with these demographic things, leads me to believe that all of this is just nonsense to try to get people into a totalitarian tax system, here in the Kingdom of Thailand.