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The gap between the very richest and the rest of us is getting bigger.
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Why?
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A common belief is that it's good for us all if a small group of people earn an enormous amount of money.
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The theory is that their wealth trickles down to the rest of us.
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But this is a myth.
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In reality, money is sucked up from all of us in to the pockets of a very small group of people.
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How does this happen?
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One reason is the way that money is created.
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Right now, almost all of the money in our economy is created by banks when they make loans.
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Now most people assume that when banks make loans, they are lending out someone else's savings.
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But they are not.
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Instead, when somebody takes out a loan, banks create new money electronically, by typing numbers in to their account.
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97 % of all of the money in our economy is created in this way, as people take out loans from banks.
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The more loans people take, the more debt there is, and the more money there is.
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The shocking fact is, if nobody went into debt, there would be almost no money in the economy.
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Our economy depends on the electronic money created by banks.
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But because the money is created when people borrow, someone, somewhere, has to pay interest on every pound created.
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In effect, we are renting the money we need to run our economy from the banks.
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This means that in the UK alone, together we pay the banks £192 million in interest every single day.
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And because the debt is held mostly by the bottom 90% and wealth mostly by the top 10%, paying this interest transfers money from the bottom 90% of the population to the very top 10%.
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It sucks wealth and income from the rest of us up to the very lucky few.
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So as long as we have to rent the money we use from the banks that create it, we'll have to keep paying this huge interest bill.
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And the gap between the richest and the rest of us will keep increasing.
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But there are ways to create money that don't depend on us all going into debt to the banks.
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We want to see money created by a public body and spent into the economy, so that we don't have to borrow all of the money we need from the banks.
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This would lead to less debt, and stop the gap between the richest and the rest of us getting even bigger.
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This is what we're campaigning for.
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