Earth Equity News

Tax the Speculators. By Ralph Nader, Common Dreams, February 8, 2009. "Let's start with a fairness point. Why should you pay a 5 to 6 percent sales tax for buying the necessities of life, when tomorrow, some speculator on Wall Street can buy $100 million worth of Exxon derivatives and not pay one penny in sales tax? Let's further add a point of common sense. The basic premise of taxation should be to first tax what society likes the least or dislikes the most, before it taxes honest labor or human needs. In that way, revenues can be raised at the same time as the taxes discourage those activities which are least valued, such as the most speculative stock market trades, pollution (a carbon tax), gambling, and the addictive industries that sicken or destroy health and amass large costs... According the University of Massachusetts economist, Robert Pollin [Tools for a New Economy, By Robert Pollin, Boston Review, Jan/Feb, 2009 issue.], various kinds of securities-trading taxes are on the books in about forty countries, including Japan, the UK and Brazil... The most discussed and popular one is a simple sales tax on currency trades across borders. Called the Tobin Tax after its originator, the late James Tobin, a Nobel laureate economist at Yale University, 10 to 25 cents per hundred dollars of the huge amounts of dollars traded each day across bordered would produce from $100 to $300 billion per year. There are scores of civic, labor, environmental, development, poverty and law groups all over the world pressing for such laws in their countries. (see tobintaxcall.free.fr)." [Editor's note: Ross Gelbspan, leading author on climate change issues and CCC steering committee member, has long advocated for a Tobin Tax, to fund a just global transition to sustainable energy.]