Targeting Wall Street, Robin Hood Tax Comes to Washington

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/30



With Congress about to begin the next cycle of budget battles – mostly focused on how much more pain to inflict on Main Street communities across America – a far different message is bubbling up across the land.

Activists from across the land gathered in Washington October 29 to step up what has become an increasingly vocal demand for a change of priorities and tone – with a call to expand the revenue pie with a tax on Wall Street speculation, the Robin Hood tax.

“The fire in this room will light up the sky for a lot of people,” said Larry Hanley, international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union surveying the room in the closing session of an action conference for the Robin Hood Tax campaign.


For the past two years, a movement has been building in the U.S., now endorsed by more than 160 local and national organizations who are calling for a sharp turn away from policies of austerity and more budget cuts with a financial transaction tax on stocks, bonds, derivatives and other financial instruments, paid by those very same banks, investment houses, hedge fund managers, and Wall Street traders who created the latest financial crisis.

Or as Hanley put it, “There’s been a 40 year crime wave and we’ve been the victims.”

[badtoworse]

1. This will wind up being paid by individual investors, not "Wall Street"

Sorry, I already pay enough in fees on my investments. I don't want this tax passed on to me.

[BKH70041]

2. George Soros won't like that.

From the article:

One of those economists, Robert Pollin, economics professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, explained to the conference that “the basic idea is a tax on every financial transaction, the equivalent of a sales tax. Who pays the tax? The people who make trades every day on Wall Street.”

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Soros is one of the better known investors who trades thousands upon thousands of times a day on the slightest of movements. He's a big money contributor to the Democratic Party. Don't see this as gathering momentum.

[seveneyes]

3. Only if it can't be passed on to the average retirement investor

Any and all new taxes must be paid by the filthy rich only. The average person pays plenty as it is.