Inclusive Prosperity Act of 2013

[KeithE]

Most of us pay a State sales tax on most any item we buy (except Alaska, Delaware,Montana,New Hampshire, Oregon where other sort of taxes are relied on). It could be 3-7.5% depending on state. Then there are local taxes on top of that. .

KeithE (Keith Ellison D-MN) has introduced HR 1579 (Inclusive Prosperity Act of 2013) on April 16, 2013 that would apply a measly 0.5% tax on financial transactions. After all "property” is being passed from one person to another; and we regard theft of money as bad as theft of material goods.

Full text (not long) is given . The bill has . As of now (7:23 CST on 3 Nov 2013) there are .

A similar Bill by Tom Harkin in 2011 that only proposed a 0.03% financial transaction tax was estimated to raise by the the Joint Tax Committee, a nonpartisan congressional scorekeeping panel. How much Ellison’s Bill (a 0.5% tax) will raise is uncertain but a good estimate (lacking a Joint Tax Committee or CBO analysis) would be $648B /year (0.5/.03 x $39B/year).

See also Table 1 which estimated a 0.5% tax as raising $348B/year for 2009. I’ll be “conversative” and say it only raises $350B/year in 2014 and beyond.

That amount of money could be used to halve our (just announced and down from $1.4T in FY2009). Or it could be used for other items (e.g. a infrastructure jobs bill - sorely needed both to fix our crumbling roads/bridges/utilities and to rev up the economy by reducing unemployment). It would also stabilize markets by slowing the automated by-the-second trading which is recognized as having a meltdown risk.

But Congress has done nothing. Their corporate sponsors (big investors) would discourage passage; so as long as this stays out of the public’s eye, Congress has their corporate donors to please.

Study this and if you agree, please sign the Petition and write your Representatives/Senators .

[ET]

[Dave Roberts]

So the Republicans keep saying we must have all the guns whether or not we have the butter, and the Democrats say we must have butter and fewer guns. Is there not a compromise position for the good of the country?

[KeithE]

[KeithE]

[Sandy]

[ET]

Sometimes it's fun to smack the pinata just to see if different "candy" comes out. Nothing new here.

Oh well, it was worth a try.

P.S. Two quick notes. The primary (and overwhelming) cause of higher revenue is economic growth, not higher taxes. Secondly, Keith appears to be in need of watching one or more of the various film incarnations of the Robin Hood myth. It is any of the various film incarnations that inform the popular imagination of Robin Hood's deeds, not the history channel. Whether it be Disney or Kevin Costner or Errol Flynn, it was oppressive government that was the enemy.

[William Thornton]

[KeithE]

[Bruce Gourley]

As has been discussed frequently here, the government has been redistributing money from the poor and middle classes to the rich for decades. Passing a tiny tax on financial transactions will do little to reverse such redistribution in the big picture, but it would be a great way to address the problem of the federal debt.

[KeithE]

[ET]

Keith, you're just fun to have around. Never would I have guessed that we'd be fussing over the details of the Robin Hood myth. But literature is open to interpretation, after all. Evil government bureaucrats (Sheriff, King John) oppressing the common man (Robin, Marion, and the gang).

Yet for all your disparaging remarks against "some Laisse-Faire, Austrian School legend book", it is we "free marketeers" who acknowledge one very important fact. As Milton Friedman stated: "When you have more government, industrialists take it over, and the two together form a coalition against the ordinary worker and the ordinary consumer." Adam Smith essentially said the same thing. Big government allows for "crony capitalism" (and a host of other evils), moneyed interests that can influence government power to benefit themselves and hamstring their competition. Thus, one of the PRIMARY reasons for we free market types support of limited government is to prevent corruption of government when big businesses seek to influence the use of government power to benefit themselves at the expense of others.

The " Laisse-Faire, Austrian School legend book" attempts to address the cause, not the symptom, by limiting the power of government. Progressives, conversely, seek to treat the pain and not remove the cancer. Serious tax reform in the form of some kind of flat tax is my desire, not adding another few thousand pages to the Federal Register or the tax code to make it even more complex and burdensome and prone to abuse and nothing but an encouragement for even more lobbyists.

I am amused, however, that educated folks such as you and Bruce are naive enough to believe such a revenue grab would ever be used to reduce the debt.....really? SERIOUSLY? A big pile of cash, in theory, would be accumulated and we are to believe that politicians of either stripe are going to just let it sit there and do something as lame as paying down the national debt? You don't get - or buy - votes by paying down debt. You get votes by spending money on goodies.