Perhaps you heard on the Marketplace Morning report this proposal to tax Wall Street transactions. The revenues would go toward deficit reduction and job creation on Main Street. I understand the motivation behind this, but there’s a pretty good case against it.
The Hill reports on what Democratic sponsors are calling the “Let Wall Street Pay for the Restoration of Main Street Act of 2009.” Catchy pop(ulist) title. Here’s the gist:
Under a bill being drafted by Democratic Reps. Peter DeFazio (Ore.) and Ed Perlmutter (Colo.), the sale and purchase of financial instruments such as stocks, options, derivatives and futures would face a 0.25 percent tax…
Half of the $150 billion in tax revenue would go toward reducing the deficit, while the other half would be deposited in a “Job Creation Reserve” to support new jobs.
More from one of the bill’s co-sponsors:
DeFazio notes that the United States had a similar tax from 1914 to 1966. The United Kingdom currently has one, he writes, and maintains “the highest volume exchange in Europe.” He said the British experience is evidence that such a tax would not push trading overseas.
Opponents believe the bill would push trading overseas. But there are other potential pitfalls. Taxes on trades as opposed to gains hit losing transactions too. The bill “aims to exempt retirement accounts from the impact of the tax,” but that sounds tricky. When a similar proposal was floated a few years ago, Matt Welch made this argument about Wall Street’s activity:
Yes, it helps lucky or shrewd investors earn money (while making many of their brokers rich), but that’s only one side of the equation. The other side is, companies get to raise money to finance their operations for such useful endeavors as … hiring people…
Whether it’s through a day-traded purchase of a brand new dot-com stock, or a 10-year corporate bond in GE, the capital markets allow companies to raise money that would otherwise not be available.
So, it’s possible a transaction tax might result in a net loss of jobs. As much as people might like to see Wall Street “controlled” through taxation, it’s difficult to pull off without damage elsewhere in the economy.
At Clusterstock, John Carney points out the reality that government stinks at creating reserve funds. The money winds up in the big pot and gets spent:
There is no way to actually have the US government accumulate a financial security surplus. In one way or another, the surplus results in the purchase of government bonds, the purchase of government bonds will generate revenue for the government, and that revenue must be spent.
In the words of humorist P.J. O’Rourke, “Having a government Trust Fund is exactly the same thing as not having a government Trust Fund.”
Your thoughts? Do you support a tax on Wall Street transactions?
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