Every year the various governments present their budgets to the representatives of the people. At Ottawa, this year, the budget was brought up on March 20.
The budget is the money which it is proposed to take from you and spend for you during the next twelve months.
"For you", doesn't mean in accordance with your instructions. Once you've paid you've nothing more to say in the matter. Oh yes, you have deputies who are supposed to accept or reject, the various items of the budget for you. But, in fact, the deputies represent only their party. And since the party in power, the government, is in the majority, and since it is the government which establishes the budget, it boils down to: budget proposed, budget accepted — after the time-honored arguments and discussions.
And what Caesars get our tax money?
Consider the budget of the federal government. If you cast your eye over the list of proposed expenditures, you'll see that most of the money is gobbled up by war and finance, Mars and Mammon.
Since the day Canada embarked on the wars "to end all wars", the two greatest expenditures on the federal budget each year have been for the armament race and the interest on the public debt, sums amounting to 1,740 millions and 492 millions, respectively, this year.
If the Caesar of war grows fat on our tax money only through the Federal government, the Caesar of Finance works not only from Ottawa but manages to suck us dry at every turn of our daily life.
You have provincial debts, municipal debts, school debts; debts on our parishes and on our various institutions, all totalling up to so many leeches bleeding the people of the fruits of their labor.
The people constructs, it makes "things", not money. The financiers make nothing; but they levy tribute on the builders; and they exact from the builders not the things which the builders make but money which they do not make. This is the most effective means of holding the people in subjugation to finance.
Property owners in our cities complain of the heavy load of taxes with which they are burdened; it seems that there is an attempt to punish or discourage private ownership. Caught in the welter of rules and regulations, helpless in the tentacles of the system, our municipal administrators, elected by us, must tax property, the fruit of the work of their constituents, and thus work to fatten finance which has become a tyrant, paralysing men and doling out a meager pittance of goods at its own caprice.
This year, the city of Montreal will collect in property taxes, $29,952,885. Of this it will pay out $18,541,190 in service of the debt — a debt which has no reason to exist.
The city of Sherbrooke will realize in property taxes, $684,333, of which $514,110 will go for the service of the debt, a debt which has no good reason for existing.
The city of Joliette will collect in property taxes, $294,934 and will spend almost the entire amount, $289,000, to service a debt which has no logical reason for existing.
In Granby, a town that is rapidly growing, 70 cents out of each $1.00 of property tax, go to service the public debt; two and a half times as much as left to service the town.
Take a look at what your own city raises in property taxes and what it spends to service the public debt; it will open your eyes!
Consider also that in the expenditures made for other items besides servicing the public debt, a part of these expenditures also goes to finance; to pay for the right to produce, e.g., the interest on the money which has bought the contractors equipment, the interest on the loans made to suppliers of materials, etc. All money begins as a debt, and as such it exacts interest.
We say that these debts, school, municipal, etc, have no true reason for existing. In fact, considered collectively, these debts constitute an unnecessary burden on the entire population of the country. Now, again from a collective point of view, all the things against which these debts have been written, were produced by that very population. A part of the people work constructing water systems, sewers, schools, etc., another group works in the fields, another in the factories. It is the sum total of all this work which has enabled the population to develop its public services.
Money is nothing more than a symbol representing wealth. Real wealth is the fruit of the people's work. Then by what unnatural manipulation of this mere symbol has it been possible to indebt the people for what they themselves have produced?
This financial crime, this perversion of reality, has poisoned our economy and through it, society and politics.
And this crime, this perversion, can be banished by the application of the Social Credit financial regime by which money becomes the exact reflection of wealth, the servant of man and not his master.
Until such time, our governments will continue to serve Mars and Mammon. They will allot a pittance, if anything, to children, mothers, the aged, the blind, invalids, and to other human beings who continue to suffer want while the country groans with surpluses.