Here are three commercials in favor of a “Robin Hood” tax. They are pretty good. The Bill Nighy one is my favorite.
If adopted in the United States, I would favor using it as a simple revenue method. Under this tax no consumer transaction would be taxed only speculative tranasctions.
Taxes should be raised on the socially useless speculations of the banking industry.
James Pilant
Here are three videos discussing the campaign for a financial transaction tax.
We should have a powerful discussion on this issue in the United States considering the behavior of the banks during the housing boom, the financial meltdown and the current mortgage crisis. They have abdicated any moral high ground they might have had and we need as a people, as a nation, to consider how to run our financial affairs. The middle class should not be a continual target for benefit cuts and tax increases. We have options.
James Pilant
A presidential panel set up to help trim the US budget deficit has called for steep spending cuts and tax rises.
The proposal would cut defence, social security and other spending, slashing a total of $4.1tn (£2.62tn) from the budget deficit by 2020.
But analysts say the panel is unlikely to ratify the plan with a vote, calling into question whether the US Congress will act on its recommendations.
“The solution will be painful,” the plan reads. “There is no easy way out.”
The US had a budget deficit of $1.3tn in the year to September, and critics have said the government should do more to narrow the gap.
Social Security pays for itself for another twenty years and its surplus is used in the U.S. to fund things like defense. Social Security taxes are only taken out of the first, 100,000 dollars or so out of income. If we raised the limit even slightly the fund would be intact for many decades.
Why is social security under attack? It’s doctrinal. Friedman economics says that government can do nothing right. Therefore, social security must by its very government nature be a failure. The numbers, the facts, the experience, – mean nothing. It’s very similar to a religion.
It’s why instead of the military rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure, we used private firms. By the Friedman doctrines, this colossal incompetence and theft of government funds would have been much worse if the government had done the job.
Private and public means to accomplish ends are choices. There is no complete superiority of one over another. There never will be. There are just tools to accomplish things, no more.
That people are able to build a strange worshipful doctrine toward “free enterprise” is a symptom of larger moral and ethical problems. But above all, it’s the result of a successful sales job paid for over decades with millions and billions of dollars and preached by dozens of well financed foundations and other advocacy organizations.
Let’s read another section from the BBC coverage –
The panel’s chairman, Mr Bowles, said the panel’s work had – at the very least – made America engage in substantive debate on the deficit issue.
“The era of debt denial and the denial of its consequences is over,” he said. “We have started an adult conversation that will dominate the debate until the elected leadership in Washington does something real.”
This is nonsense. These measures have been preached for decades by “free market” conservatives.
Besides the real issues aren’t even on the table. Why do we allow companies based and operating in the United States to offshore their tax burden? What is fair tax code and what do we need to do to enforce it? I could go on.
But if you want to quickly discover the intellectual and moral absence in the committee’s recommendations, you only have to examine the question of a bank tax.
What is a bank tax, you say?
It is the phrase that must not be spoken.
Formerly, the United States was a manufacturing giant, so it gathered its taxes from a well paid middle class and by taxes on goods. Now we live in a nation based on finance and “play” money. Financial speculation is the rule of the day. Since our economy is now based on finance, doesn’t it make sense to change the nature of our tax structure to reflect our current realities? What we have now is a shrinking manufacturing base and a deteriorating middle class. We also have a banking and financial industry wedded at the hip to tax rescues and government guarantees. That merits taxation. Yet, a tax to raise a mere twenty billion dollars to help pay for another bailout was defeated in the middle of this year.
Let’s try another phrase, financial transaction tax.
No one seems to talk about this one either. Did the debt commission talk about this for page after page? You’re going to read more about it here.
A report on this kind of tax suggests that even a small, simple tax will produce 100 billion dollars in revenue each. Obviously, a trillion in a decade.
That’s deficit reduction.
There is much more to talk about. But there seems little likelihood of a genuine discussion outside of the limits established by the beltway pundits. We can only talk about Medicare, Social Security and a PR campaign of little significance to rein in defense spending. I see nothing else in the proposals likely of actual action except the mortgage deduction.
President Obama stacked the committee with those who had long wanted to attack social programs. Those programs that benefit the middle class are those that will be successfully attacked. The middle class has been targeted for four decades with continued success. There is no reason for Washington to stop now.
James Pilant
My readers have increased in number fairly dramatically in this last year. I’ve talked to other bloggers, many with far more audience than I have. They tell me that the vast majority of people do not comment and probably will never comment. I remember laughing with another blogger (if you can do that online) that we seemed to be the only two people discussing his post and he had almost a thousand hits on it.
As we discussed it, he told me of his surprise that so few comments had been posted out of so many visitors.
He would have like to have had more of an ongoing conversation with his readers and so do I.
So, if you want to say something do so.
I have a rule in my class – proving the teacher wrong, arguing with the teacher, disagreeing with the teacher, or telling the teacher something he doesn’t want to hear, will never in any way harm your grade. In fact, sometimes it has given me the opportunity to raise a grade based on class participation and my delight in finding a fighting spirit out there in the group. Fighting spirits can be annoying and difficulty and they are also major engines of change. I give them credit when ever I see one.
I am going to brag on myself. One charming young lady was able to correct me factually twice one semester. She holds the record.
So, if you see that my rule with people who are actually physically present is toleration and interest, why don’t you feel free to jump in?
As always, whether you ever comment or not, I deeply appreciate you taking the time to read my writings. Millions of people write on the web generally just to themselves and a few friends. I have been blessed that others have taken an interest in what I say. Your attention to my writing, my ideas, is a great gift to me. Thank You!
James Pilant
P.S. If you can correct my facts, please, always do so. I am going to be wrong in my opinions at one time or another, and that’s okay. But being wrong on the facts is not okay. So, please let me know immediately if my data is wrong.
Here are the key findings from the Pew Research Center Analysis.
* One-quarter (24%) of 2008 bachelor’s degree graduates at for-profit schools borrowed more than $40,000, compared with 5% of graduates at public institutions and 14% at not-for-profit schools.
* Roughly one-in-four recipients of an associate’s degree or certificate borrowed more than $20,000 at both private for-profit and private not-for-profit schools, compared with 5% of graduates of public schools.
* Graduates of private for-profit schools are demographically different from graduates in other sectors. Generally, private for-profit school graduates have lower incomes, and are older, more likely to be from minority groups, more likely to be female, more likely to be independent of their parents and more likely to have their own dependents.
* Although private for-profit schools specialize in different fields of study than do public and private not-for-profit schools, the differences in borrowing patterns persist within fields of study. For almost every field of study at every level, students at private for-profit schools are more likely to borrow and tend to borrow larger amounts than students at public and private not-for-profit schools.
Here’s some more from the report –
Undergraduate college student borrowing has risen dramatically in recent years. Graduates who received a bachelor’s degree in 2008 borrowed 50% more (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than their counterparts who graduated in 1996, while graduates who earned an associate’s degree or undergraduate certificate in 2008 borrowed more than twice what their counterparts in 1996 had borrowed, according to a new analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data by the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project.
I’m sure there are people who look at this and say these young people are borrowing too much money and that may often be true. But if you follow the costs of going to college, tuition, books, etc., you come to a different conclusion. Since students can borrow money to a guarenteed level, tuition and fees will rise toward that level each year. When the level is raised, the college and university costs start their inexorable increase to get all the loan money possible. When the top borrowing amount no longer works for a number of institutions, the borrowing cap is raised and it starts all over again.
Tuition costs have increased at twice the level of medical costs increases over the last decade. That’s right. Even the insurance companies couldn’t keep up with the colleges and universities of the United States.
James Pilant
My previous post (actually about twenty minutes ago) discusses the Irish debt crisis. But I am not on the scene, I don’t live in Ireland. But homopilosophicus is a citizen and writes from there. Here is his take on the crisis. It’s intelligent and it’s a person, not a media company, not a corporation. He’s not selling anything or wanting you to do anything except understand.
James Pilant
This is from the Associated Press –
Ireland’s international bailout boosted its bank stocks Monday, but outraged many hard-pressed taxpayers, who questioned why the government’s pension reserves must be ravaged as part of a deal that burdens the whole country with the mistakes of a rich elite.
Shares in Ireland’s banks rose sharply as markets were encouraged by the bailout’s immediate focus on injecting €10 billion into the cash-strapped lenders out of a total of €67.5 billion ($89 billion) in loans.
But the Irish were shocked by a key condition for the rescue — that the government use €17.5 billion of its own cash and pension reserves to shore up its public finances, which have been overwhelmed by recession and exceptional costs of a runaway bank-bailout effort.
Opposition leaders and economists warned that the EU-IMF credit line’s average interest rate of 5.8 percent would be too high to repay. They also questioned why senior bondholders of Ireland’s struggling banks — chiefly other banks in Britain, Germany and the U.S. — still weren’t being asked to bear some costs.
Here’s what’s been happening. About twenty years ago, the Irish bought in to the Friedman Economic Theories (FREE MARKET) and freed their system from the chains of regulation. After that, the economy took off like a rocket. Actually the economy did take off but only for certain sectors of the economy particularly the financial industry. All that rocket climb was just a bubble of speculation and when the cloud of dust settled the state banks were deep in the hole. The Irish nationalized the banks and have since bailed them out to the tune of 100 billion dollars. This is smaller than the the U.S. bailout (TARP) but from a very, very much smaller nation (4.5 million people).
They are getting to a loan to keep their economy afloat from other European nations. To get it, they have to put the nation’s pensions funds up as a guarantee. People are unhappy about this.
But here’s the kicker. This is what is really making people mad. The bondholders of these banks are not required to pay for any portion of this at all. Zero!
If they had turned away the huge profits made during the “Celtic Lion” period like a benevolent aristocracy, I might cut them some slack but they didn’t quibble about taking the money. And now the Irish people, in particular, the ones that never profited from the whole economic de-regulation, speculation nightmare, are going to pay for it.
James Pilant
“No weapons, no blood,” Cantona said, invoking the calling card of notorious French bank robber Albert Spaggiari, who in 1976 made off with millions of francs after tunneling his way into a branch of Societe Generale.
Cantona’s call has been taken up by “Stop Banque,” a France-based movement that is advocating a run on banks on Dec. 7. The group’s Facebook page has 10,872 fans and has spawned a number of other Facebook groups, including “Revolution by withdrawing banks’ money,” which calls on citizens to strike “a terrible blow” at the heart of the global economy. It currently has just over 300 followers.
A French soccer star who played for the U.K.’s Manchester Untied for nearly five years, Cantona is nothing short of a living legend to many of his fans. He was named the team’s player of the century in 2001 and is fondly nicknamed “King Eric.”
His call for a financial revolution has prompted France’s economy minister to speak out. On Wednesday, Christine Lagarde told him to stick to football not finance, telling a news conference, “Mr. Cantona is no stranger to controversy. He is a great footballer, but I’m not sure we need to pay heed to all his suggestions.”
Doesn’t sound like a bad suggestion to me. The banks appear to have little to fear from the feds. Maybe being afraid of us would frighten them into acting more like members of the community and less like pirates.
James Pilant
This is just delicious fun. This is an intriguing, sometimes funny, brief introduction of Socrates.
James Pilant
The BBC reports that a European Investigation will be launched over complaints about Google.
EU launches antitrust probe into alleged Google abuses
The European Commission has launched an investigation into Google after other search engines complained that the firm had abused its dominant position.
The EC will examine whether the world’s largest search engine penalised competing services in its results.
The probe follows complaints by firms including price comparison site Foundem and legal search engine ejustice.fr.
What we are talking about here is search results. You enter a search on Google and ten results come up on the first page. There are often thousands and, on occasion, millions of hits. The order of these hits is vital to web site success. If you are selling something, for instance, like coffee and your search result puts you at 213, you’re not going to sell very much coffee.
Google’s competitors are alleging that the company manipulates its search results to make competitors, well, less competitive. They allege that their place in the hierarchy, say fifteenth in a search, would be seventh if the “real” results were posted.
This is the kind of problem you can expect with a company that controls a very large part of the market and has components that compete with other companies that use the Internet.
James Pilant
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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