Corporate-backed 'Fix the Debt' Campaign Only Wants to Protect Wall Street

[Bill USA]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/corporate-backed-fix-debt-campaign-only-wants-protect-wall-street

Funny how they don't seem to want a financial transaction tax.

At this point everyone knows about Fix the Debt. It is a collection of corporate CEOs put together by Peter Peterson, the Wall Street private equity mogul. Ostensibly they want to reduce budget deficits and the national debt, but for some reason their attention always seems focused on cutting Social Security and Medicare. While some in this group will allow for minor tax increases, budget cuts are explicitly a priority, with these two programs firmly in their crosshairs.

Given that the stated goal of this group is to reduce budget deficits, it is worth asking why taxes don’t figure more prominently on their agenda. After all, the United States ranks near the bottom of wealthy countries in its tax take as a share of GDP. It is also worth asking why one tax in particular, a financial transactions tax, never seems to get mentioned in anything the group or its members do.

This omission is striking because so many others in budget debates in the United States and around the world regularly suggest such a tax. There is a long list of highly respected economists who have advocated such taxes, starting with John Maynard Keynes. The list includes many Nobel Prize winners, most notably James Tobin who wrote several papers arguing for such a tax as a way to both raise revenue and slow speculative trading.

Financial transactions taxes are hardly new. The United Kingdom has had a tax on stock trades in place since 1694. It still imposes a tax of 0.5 percent on trades. Relative to the size of its economy the tax raises the equivalent of $30-40 billion a year in the United States. Many other countries, including India and China, have financial transactions taxes. The United States used to have a tax of 0.04 percent on stock trades until 1966 and still has a very small tax that is used to finance the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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[Pakid]

1. 2 words Greedy SOB'S