Now that coronavirus mass hysteria and mandatory lockdowns have pushed workers into their homes, socialist schemers seek to institute a work-from-home tax, WSOC-TV in Charlotte reported.
The tax revenue would be used as a $1,500 per month universal basic income payment for people who stay at home but do not work and do not annually earn more than $30,000.
Economists at Deutsche Bank concocted the idea in a report titled, “What We Must Do to Rebuild,” which contains a number of globalist-socialist dreams, including a digital currency.
“The sudden shift to WFH [work from home] means that, for the first time in history, a big chunk of people have disconnected themselves from the face-to-face world yet are still leading a full economic life,” researcher Luke Templeman wrote in the report. “That means remote workers are contributing less to the infrastructure of the economy whilst still receiving its benefits.”
Templeman’s concern is that workers in the coronavirus world order do not leave their homes as often, so they do not buy as much gasoline, takeout food and drinks, clothes, and repairs. Tax revenue for the state, as a result, declines.
The work-from-home tax would begin at $10 a day or 5 percent of wages per year, meaning that the average worker who earns $55,000 a year would pay $2,750 a year for the right to use his or her own home as a workplace.
Templeman wrote that workers would normally pay this amount of money for all the goods normally purchased while working outside the home.
Permanent employees would directly pay the tax while short-term employees would have the tax withheld from their paycheck by their employers.
The report suggests that workers should not have to pay the tax when governments shut down businesses and issue house-arrest orders.
The tax would only apply to employees who have the legal option of working at their place of employment but choose to work from home.
Self-employed individuals and low-income employees would be exempt from the tax.
Templeman wrote that the “popularity of WFH was growing even before the pandemic,” with a 173 percent growth in employees working from home between 2005 and 2018.
Still, only 5.4 percent of people worked from home before the coronavirus shutdowns.
After the shutdowns, however, that percentage jumped to 56 percent.
Many employees say that they like the arrangement.
Surveys show that more than half of workers want to keep working from home for two or three days a week, even after the government will allow them to return to work.
Companies report that they are ready to cement part of this revolution in working habits, too.
“Indeed, two-thirds of organizations say that at least three-quarters of their staff can work from home effectively, according to S&P Global Markets,” Templeman wrote.
He calls this revolution in work “a state of ‘human disconnection,'” and he considers it to be a permanent feature of the post-COVID new normal.
Templeman wrote that the benefits and financial gains or working at home “generally outweigh the costs” of the “additional mental stress of juggling work and children, and dealing with an imperfect home-office setup.”
Since he thinks working from home is superior to working at an office, he concludes that people able to work from home “owe” money to those who cannot.
“From a personal and economic point of view, it makes sense that these people should be given a helping hand,” he wrote. “It also makes sense to recognise that essential workers that [sic] assume covid risk for low wages. Those who are lucky enough to be in a position to ‘disconnect’ themselves from the face-to-face economy owe it to them.”
The Deutsche Bank research also looks at the competition among central banks to implement digital currencies, a change that was in progress before the pandemic but did not accelerate until afterward.
“In the US, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started a multiyear CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency] initiative in August this year,” researcher Marion Laboure wrote. “At first, this was helped by initial drafts of the covid stimulus bill which included plans to create digital dollar wallets to distribute social benefits.”
Leaders did not move forward with the plan, but Laboure thinks that digital currencies will become widespread as soon as citizens forego their “cultural/privacy norms” and banks raise interest rates.
