How to Protect Yourself from Our Country's Fiscal Challenges: My Interview with Van Mueller (Part 1)

The general public should definitely be paying attention to the impact of inflation and what’s driving it. The government has gone to such ridiculous measures printing money that by the year 2029 the government will literally have to print the entire budget of the United States.

Instead of inflation, we should be thinking of it in terms of a stealth tax. The M2 money supply is a good barometer for inflation statistics and by 2029 they are expecting the current M2 money supply to exceed $122 trillion, a near ten-fold increase from what’s in circulation today.

This increase in the money supply reduces every single American’s purchasing power and constitutes an additional tax over and above the existing taxes.

If you can reduce or eliminate your income tax liability, you are offsetting some of the damage of reduced purchasing power.

It’s vital to understand that not only is the government going to increase your income tax, they are also going to dramatically increase your stealth tax by decreasing your purchasing power.

There are solutions to these situations that allow you to win, not just reduce the pain. The secret is in taking action before these problems can impact you. Truthinaccounting.org was created by accountants to give people an accurate picture of the financial state of the federal and state governments. The situation is bleak with the vast majority not being able to pay their bills already.

We will be about $87 trillion in debt by 2029. We are going to have to deal with a new financial world that requires some strategies that protect you from the ridiculousness of government.

States and cities are unable to print money, so the only way to pay their bills is to increase taxes, reduce benefits, borrow more money, or a combination of all three. The bailout precedent has already been set, but even if they get a bailout you will still be impacted. Even if the benefit remains, they are going to increase the taxes on it and reduce your purchasing power at the same time.

If you add up all the money that the US government has ever printed, you will find thatover 40% of it was printed in the year 2020. They now have an unlimited printing machine that they are going to use regardless of the damage it’s going to do to you, your children, and your grandchildren.

The debt we talk about is not even the full picture because it does not include all the unfunded obligations.

Most people expect to inherit their money all at the same time, regardless of the taxes they will have to pay. This usually doesn’t end well. Van helps his clients to eliminate the income tax burden completely.

It makes much more sense to pay taxes at the grandparent’s historically low tax rates and reposition the money to tax-free now, instead of having to distribute the money all at the same time because of the Secure Act.

Covid-19 has changed everything, but nobody knows just how much yet. The latest jobs report indicated that another 792,000 people have filed for unemployment. This means that 49% of all the workers in the US have filed for unemployment since the pandemic began.

There are many jobs and industries that are not coming back or will be operating under a completely new paradigm.

Even if we taxed every person who made more than $100,000 by 100% it would barely make a dent in the yearly federal budget. 81% of Americans make less than $75,000 a year, so anyone who makes more than that has a major target on their back.

The government needs revenue, and they aren’t going to wait. Over the next 25 years there are going to be 140 million Americans over the age of 65 and they are going to need money to pay those people.

We don’t have a tax problem, we have a spending problem. It’s easy to blame taxes, but if we spent what we brought in and lived within our means we would be in a completely different scenario. The trouble is no one has the political will to say no.

 

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Van Mueller's newsletter and audio training for financial advisors can be found at vanmueller.com