"Taxes will rise unless we can raid bank accounts"

"Taxes will have to rise unless officials are given new powers to raid people's bank accounts, [the UK's] David Cameron said.

..."It is very clear that they can only do this if there is a debt of over £1,000, they can only do it if there's £5,000 or more in the account after this has been completed. The general principle – do we want to pursue every avenue of making people pay their taxes they are meant to pay before we put up taxes, because that's the alternative – absolutely, yes we do."

The policy yesterday faced further criticism from chartered accountants, who said that money should only be taken from people's accounts with their agreement or a court order.

...Under the planned new measures, tax officials will have an automatic power to take money from a bank account when the holder has failed to act on four formal warnings requiring payment.

Currently officials can only remove money in this way with the permission of a magistrate or judge.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/tax/10819885/David-Cameron-Taxes-will-rise-unless-we-can-raid-bank-accounts.html
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The Central Bank Emperors with no clothes

http://hartzman.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-central-bank-emperors-with-no.html
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"An invaluable lesson for U.S. Citizens from the bank confiscation in Cyprus"

"...an entire nation was frozen out of its savings… overnight.

...It’s certainly a chilling reminder of how quickly things can change. And why.

The entire crisis sprang from a mountain of debt. The government had accumulated too much debt. The banking system had accumulated too much debt.

And banks had lost a lot of their customers’ money making risky, stupid bets on things like Greek government bonds.

By March 2013, Cypriot banks were almost entirely devoid of cash.

Sure, customers could log on to a website and check their bank balances.

But there’s a huge difference between a number displayed on a screen, and a well-capitalized bank that actually holds abundant cash.

The government was too insolvent to bail anyone out. And as a member of the eurozone, Cyprus didn’t have the ability to print its own money.

So they did the only thing they could think of– confiscate customer deposits.

And they imposed capital controls on top of that to make sure that people couldn’t withdraw their remaining funds out of the banks as soon as the freeze was lifted.

...even though it all unfolded overnight, the warning signs were building for at least a year. Especially the debt.

When countries, central banks, and commercial banks accumulate too much debt, and specifically too much debt relative to assets, you can be certain there is trouble ahead in the system.

...The US government’s official, ‘on the books’ debt now exceeds $17.5 trillion. This is an enormous figure.

If the Uncle Sam just happened to have $20 trillion or so laying around, however, this debt load wouldn’t be a big deal. But that’s not the case.

By the US government’s own admission, their own financial statements show net equity (assets minus liabilities) of MINUS $16.9 trillion.

That’s including ALL the assets: Every tank. Every bullet. Every body scanner. Every highway.

...The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet has exploded since 2008, and right now the Fed’s net equity (assets minus liabilities) is about $56 billion.

...you now have an insolvent government and insolvent central bank underpinning a commercial banking system that is incentivized to make risky, stupid bets with their customers’ money.

http://www.sovereignman.com/finance/invaluable-lesson-bank-confiscation-cyprus-13858/