Bill Moyers & Company S1E15: Fighting for Fair Play on TV and Taxes [New]
Insight on tax fairness and political ads with RoseAnn DeMoro and Kathleen Hall Jamieson:
UPDATE:
RoseAnn DeMoro appeared on The Real News Network and together with Robert Pollin, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, talked about the financial transactions tax:
Transcript:
ROBERT POLLIN: Okay. So the basic idea of a financial transaction tax is that it’s the equivalent of a sales tax. Right now if you go down the street and you buy a bicycle, if you buy a car, if you buy chewing gum, if you buy a baseball hat, you’re going to pay 6, 7 percent on your sale. So $100 sale, you’re going to pay $6. Right now, every single financial transaction on Wall Street and throughout the world—that is, every purchase of the stock, every purchase of a bond, a derivative, foreign exchange—goes untaxed. So this is an enormous potential source of new tax revenue, even to just come up to something like a degree of fairness relative to a sales tax.Now, if we start with a very modest tax on stocks of 0.5 percent, that would mean $.50 on a $100 purchase of stocks, which would then mean, say, $0.25 for the buyer and the seller, $0.25 on a transaction of $100 of stock. Then if we also tax bonds and derivatives at much lower rates, you can generate around $350 billion a year within the United States. Three hundred and fifty billion dollars a year, that’s more than one-third of the entire federal deficit. It’s more than three times more [than] all the states’ deficits and the austerity programs that they are being forced into. You could cover those three times over just by implementing a financial transaction tax.
UPDATE END
Episode description:
Fighting for Fair Play on TV and Taxes
May 11, 2012With the 2012 campaign season moving from primary to election mode, Bill invites back to his studio master media decoder Kathleen Hall Jamieson for a closer look at the role misinformation will play in the Obama vs. Romney TV ad slugfest.
Jamieson, who runs the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, including the sites FactCheck.org and FlackCheck.org, discusses the sharp increase in deceptive advertising in the 2012 race, and equally-alarming new obstacles to campaign ad transparency.
Later in the show, Bill talks to RoseAnn DeMoro, who heads the largest registered nurses union in the country, and will lead a Chicago march protesting economic inequality on May 18. DeMoro is championing the Robin Hood Tax, a small government levy the financial sector would pay on commercial transactions like stocks and bonds. The money generated, which some estimate could be as much as $350 billion annually, could be used for social programs and job creation — ultimately to people who, without a doubt, need it more than the banks do. DeMoro and her organization have an inspiring history of defeating some of the toughest opponents in government and politics.
What Do You Think?
5 Responses to 'Bill Moyers & Company S1E15: Fighting for Fair Play on TV and Taxes'
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Emocrat [New]
Saturday, 12 May, 2012 at 10:12 am
I watched the Kathleen Hall Jamieson segment. She really is a pseudo-centrist hack, but also makes the very valid point that “campaigns are being separated from governance.” But then she follows that up with the vacuous establishment claim that it’s “polarization” between left and right that’s the problem.
IOW, she’s all bi-partisany and she thinks official Washington isn’t.
Then she goes on to suggest a debate on Bowles-Simpson in a way that proves my point: she wants to hear how candidates think it should be implemented. She is apparently not interested in hearing how it’s a bad idea and ought to be sorted into the circular file.
So debate is okay, as long as it stays within the parameters she lays out, which is a very narrow frame indeed.
In this sense, then, she exemplifies the means by which campaigns and governance become separated. She seems willfully unaware that a debate between two people whose only real differences lie in the rapidity with which they intend to destroy the Social Contract is not a debate at all, but an exercise in mutual self-preening.
In this sense then, KHJ is as much a part of the problem she outlines as anyone else. And it’s not like FactCheck.org has been without its problems, eh?
Saturday, 12 May, 2012 at 9:16 pm
Oh yeah, she’s a typical DC pundit that has to find fault on how the two aisles sees an argument. Examining the argument itself is “unwise.”
Sunday, 13 May, 2012 at 12:37 pm
I’m a bit worried with message used to sell the financial transaction tax. I support it completely, I’m worried how it’s being promoted.
The official website says:
the nurses website says:
and from roseann demoro’s first words at bill moyers’:
what worries me is I don’t see the word fairness anywhere there. yes, it’s being hinted at a couple of places, but why not say it? I searched demoro’s transcript for the word ‘fair’ (that would catch words like ‘fairness’ too) and didn’t find anything. why not “I pay tax, you pay tax, why Wall Street isn’t?’ I think Americans are a lot more receptive to tax fairness messages than wealth gap messages:
look at the last sentence in demoro’s quote. she says “the excessive wealth that’s been taken out of the economy”. why say ‘taken out of the economy’ and not ‘taken out of the people’. put a face on the ‘taken out of’. the ‘out of the economy’ is somewhat faceless.
Emocrat [New]
Sunday, 13 May, 2012 at 1:03 pm
Great points.
Even a “you broke it, you bought it” response to Wall Street would sing. Or the fact that this tax would be completely painless, even to the Wall Streeters.
70% of all stock trades are carried out by High-Frequency Trading algos, which is to say the banksters computers are literally trading with each other. So 70% of the tax would be collected from those servers’ interactions with each other. It’s difficult to imagine a more painless tax. Retail “investors” wouldn’t even notice it when they make a trade or three.
“It’s only fair that we tax the banks that are now posting record profits and bonuses amidst the depression that they themselves caused in the first place.”
Could anyone dispute the essential truth in that?
Wednesday, 16 May, 2012 at 7:14 pm
I liked Robert Pollin’s explanation (in the update of the post) to what is the financial transaction tax: “the equivalent of a sales tax [for Wall Street].