There’s been a lot of discussion about the need for concrete demands from the #AmericanAutumn #OccupyWallStreet protests.
I just want to toss up the wholly unoriginal idea of a tax on financial transactions, originally proposed by James Tobin (he focused on international transactions, but the distinction is no longer meaningul). I’ve seen a sign advocating this on one of the videos of the protest, but I think it deserves more attention, for a bunch of reasons
* It’s directed squarely at Wall Street
* It’s global in its orientation
* It doesn’t require complicated structural change, as would a return of Glass-Steagall
* There’s an existing global movement supporting it
* It’s on the elite policy table right now, with support from the EU
* It would potentially raise substantial revenue, while greatly reducing the volume of short-term financial transactions
Here’s a a piece I wrote about not long ago in Politics and Society and an older article on the Tobin tax, and over the fold some notes I prepared for our Parliamentary Library a few years back