Hey did you hear? It turns out that the recession is over! Nevermind that the real unemployment rate is creeping up on 20%
Never mind that companies and individuals the world over have had to cut their spending to the bone, close their doors, lose their homes, declare bankruptcy, or visit pawn shops to make an extra buck.
Never mind that trillions of dollars of public money has gone into private hands "for the good of the economy" all the while causing governments to make tough decisions between whether or not to keep paying grannie smith her pension or close the public library (who needs books anyway!?! Seriously...)
No, the masters of the universe, the major banks and financial investment firms have cheerily declared that the emergency is over. While millions across the globe face a dark future of either sub-standard work, no work or a lifetime of transient labor (it's called going where the work is, look up the history of coal miners in 19th century America) The banks have had their keesters pulled out of the fire and in their books all is well now.
Now that the predatory, flawed system of casino capitalism has been preserved with YOUR tax dollars, the banks are quite content to sit back, pull in a decent profit and watch from their glass towers while the ants below (that's you and me) languish and fight each other for whatever scraps are left over.
Don't believe me? All the mouthpieces from the ass-hat economists who never saw the fiasco coming to well-paid analysts are saying the same thing; life for corporate America is safe, as for the rest of us, well, we can go pound sand. After we bailed them out, they've turned around and said
"Hey, thanks for the help. We're fine now, so you can fuck off. I hear Wal-mart might be hiring in the next county"
The situation isn't right, nor is it fair, and there's a lot of things I think should be done to these folks that will most assuredly never come to be.
But one thing that can and -should- be done?
Let's tax the hell out of them!
Now don't get your panties in a knot. I'm not talking about taxing "the rich", or about taking money from the well-to-do small business owner who's struggling to break even, or the middle class (which by the way is disapearing rapidly)
No, I want to tax the FINANCIAL economy.
For anyone not familiar, we have two types of economy. The first is the real economy. This is widgets built or services rendered. "Widget" means anything from furniture to cars to food to software. Something tangible. Services rendered is everything from a plumber fixing that leak in your house to the barber who gives you a haircut to the accountant who does your taxes.
The financial economy, however is another matter entirely. This economy was never intended to be it's own little world but started out as a means of supporting and growing the real economy. However, things have gotten flipped around and now the financial economy has largely become parasitic to the real economy -and- exists in a magical world of make believe in which virtual money trades hands, and, magically creates more virtual money.
It's all quite convoluted but to a great extent it's become the world's biggest show of smoke and mirrors to hide the fact that no real work is being done or goods produced to "create" all of this virtual wealth. As a side effect of creating this world of financial make-believe, the real world consequences are quite apparent as ultimately the buck has to stop somewhere and it's turned out to be the real economy. Shenanigans and "exotic" debt models created by the banks purely based on a greed for profit have mucked up things royally back in real world resulting in massive unemployment, bankruptcies and foreclosures galore.
So, back to my solution.
In order to reign in the beast and return the financial economy to it's rightful place as a support mechanism, we should tax financial transactions.
Everytime a share of stock is bought, we should put a 0.25 % financial transactions tax on it.
This means, if you were to buy 10,000 dollars of stock you would pay 25 dollars at the time of purchase in tax. If, 10 years later you were to sell that same stock for 20,000 dollars, you would have to pay a whole 50 dollars. No big deal right?
Under this system, if you're buying stock with the intent of holding on to it for awhile (as it should be) you've got nothing to worry about.
If you're a day trader who buys at 1 PM with the intent of selling at 2 PM, this will take a bigger chunk out of your pocket and discourage such practices.
A financial transactions tax doesn't address all the issues but it's a start, and it penalizes the speculators who want to turn a fast buck for no work. Fuck them, they can and should get a job at Wal-mart alongside the recently laid off manufacturing worker!
The best part? This isn't my idea. It's already being done in England and I got the concept from this article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/09/us-wall-street-financial-transactions-tax