Sometimes the stars align, and what once seems far fetched suddenly becomes possible. For years people like Dean Baker and Paul Krugman have been recommending a financial transactions tax. It brings in immense amount of revenue, discourages useless and non-productive speculation, and has negligible impact on people who are buying stocks for actual investment. Since it makes so much sense, it has of course been a non-starter, except, curiously, Britain has had one for years, and it has worked well.
Now, according to the Times, even the corporate puppets are starting to talk about it:
Driven by populist anger at bankers as well as government needs for more revenue, the idea of a tax on trades of stocks, bonds and other financial instruments has attracted an array of influential champions, including the leaders of France and Germany, the billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and George Soros, former Vice President Al Gore, the consumer activist Ralph Nader, Pope Benedict XVI and the archbishop of Canterbury.
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The Robin Hood tax has also become a rallying point for labor unions, nongovernmental organizations and the Occupy Wall Street movement, which view it as a way to claw back money from the top 1 percent to help the other 99 percent. Last month, thousands of demonstrators, including hundreds in Robin Hood outfits with bright green caps and bows and arrows, flooded into southern France to urge the leaders of the Group of 20 nations to do more to help the poor, including passing a financial transactions tax.
Oddly enough, according to the article, the British PM seems to feel that such a tax would destroy the financial sector in London, even though they’ve had a fairly large tax on certain transactions for more than a century. One would think if the tax were going to drive traders from London it would have done so already.
The Obama White House, predictably, prefers to talk about a more ineffective, politically less appealing approach, which is equally impossible to get through Congress at the present time. Why appeal to your base when you can waste time trying to satisfy people who will never even accept your legitimacy? Maybe it has something to do with all those Wall Street dollars the Obama campaign is raking in.
Still, it’s good to see that this idea is gaining traction. It may be that it has high profile advocates, but for my money, it would never have come up for discussion had the Occupy movement never taken place. It’s amazing what a bunch of kids in tents and a few cops with a liberal supply of pepper spray can do.
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