Last comment: you need to think about reduction of debt relative to the GDP as a 10-year project and in order to get the economy back on track, we may well need, we do need, more deficit spending now and in the next year but with a pre commitment to deficit reduction over 10 years through progressive taxation,
one of the things we seem to agree on is a financial transactions tax, taxes aimed at the people who are still making out in this crisis so that the benefit can go to ordinary people and we don’t have to sacrifice the recovery on the long term/short term deficit reduction.
a pre commitment to deficit reduction over 10 years through progressive taxationWe need deficit reduction via A) cutting spending and B) ridding ourselves of the raise-taxes crowd.
Apparently Robert Kuttner does the hard drugs.
This tax on financial transactions is another really bad idea from organized labor. This tax would be a major cost increase for active trading firms and active individual traders, who are a big revenue source for brokerage firms. So active trading volume would decline substantially, causing greater price volatility and reducing the revenues of brokerage firms. Brokers would then have to spread their fixed overhead costs over a smaller revenue base and would be forced to raise commissions for all clients, big and small. So trading costs for individuals, mutual funds, and pension funds would increase by at least 50%, including the tax. That’s how most of the tax would be paid, by higher trading costs and lower return on investment by high-income individuals, mutual funds, pension funds, and other institutional investors.
This is a classic income redistribution scheme by labor to extract taxes from higher income people and redistribute them to lower income people through federal entitlement programs. That’s the primary goal of organized labor today: thinly disguised socialist income redistribution.