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Where the Money Is
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Issue
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Jan 13, 2009 08:00am |
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| Category | Opinion |
| Media | Newspaper - New York Times |
| News Date | Monday, January 12, 2009 01:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | President-elect Barack Obama is warning us to expect trillion-dollar budget deficits “for years to come.”
The economy is in a precipitous downturn and no one, on the left or right, is advocating tax increases that would jeopardize a recovery.
At some point, however, someone is going to have to talk about raising revenue. The dreaded T-word is going to come up: taxes.
The economist Dean Baker is a strong advocate of a financial transactions tax. This would impose a small fee — ranging up to, say, 0.25 percent — on the sale or transfer of stocks, bonds and other financial assets, including the seemingly endless variety of exotic financial instruments that have been in the news so much lately.
According to Mr. Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, the fees would raise a ton of money, perhaps $100 billion or more annually — money that the government sorely needs.
But there’s another intriguing element to the proposal. While the fees would be a trivial expense for what the general public tends to think of as ordinary traders — people investing in stocks, bonds or other assets for some reasonable period of time — they would amount to a much heavier lift for speculators, the folks who bring a manic quality to the markets, who treat it like a casino. |
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