THE money tree, sometimes known informally as Quantitative Easing is a form of taxation, for those who say that Corbyn should use taxation to raise money, rather than use his infamous tree.

If for example, you ‘print’ one billion pounds of money, and use it to pay for public services etc, then you will have one billion pounds more cash in the economy available to buy goods and services than you had previously.

This leads to the devaluation of the wealth that was previously in the economy, and leads, I suppose, to a bit of inflation, effectively taxing anyone with any wealth by x per cent on that wealth.

Baked beans for example may rise in price by one penny, so that one penny will be the tax that people will pay the government for whatever they spent their QE money on.

Maybe it is kind of unfair to tax everyone a flat rate, rich or poor, but at least rich people, and companies, do have to pay this QE taxation, rather than burying it in the garden, or whatever they do with it.

The housewife and her credit card is a simplistic metaphors that fail because a housewife rarely has the authority to print her own money; sure she has a dodgy neighbour who has wired in his electric circuit to her system, and siphons off electric power, to his haven and she has to keep paying money out to prop up her gambling addict uncle, but maybe a simple metaphor can’t always map out onto the whole complex economy of a country?

R Brown

Stroud