DOCSLIB.ORG

Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity · LRB 18 February 2016

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity · LRB 18 February 2016 8/30/2016 James Meek · Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity · LRB 18 February 2016 Back to article page Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity James Meek 00:00 81:58 Myth is a story that can be retold by anyone, with infinite variation, and still be recognisable as itself. The outline of surviving myth is re­recognised in the lives of each generation. It’s an instrument by which people simplify, rationalise and retell social complexities. It’s a means to haul the abstract, the global and the relative into the realm of the concrete, the local and the absolute. It’s a way to lay claim to faith in certain values. If those who attempt to interpret the world do so only through the prism of professional thinkers, and ignore the persistence of myth in everyday thought and speech, the interpretations will be deficient. This is the importance of the Robin Hood myth. It’s the first and often the only political­ economic fable we learn. It’s not a children’s story, although it is childlike. It contains the three essential ingredients of grown­up narrative – love, death and money – without being a love story, a tragedy or a comedy. It doesn’t tell of the founding of a people. It’s not a fairy story or a religious myth; it has no monsters, gods or wizards in it, only human beings. It’s not a parable. In place of a moral, it has a plan of action. What does Robin Hood do? We all know. He takes from the rich to give to the poor. A change has come over Robin Hood. On the surface, he’s the same: the notion of taking from the rich to give to the poor is as popular as ever. But in the deeper version of his legend, the behaviour­shaping myth, he’s become hard to recognise. The storytelling that makes up popular political discourse is crowded with tales of robbery, but the story has been cloven. I can no longer be sure that my Robin Hood is your Robin Hood, or that my rich and poor is your rich and poor, or who is taking and who is giving. The old Robin Hood, embodiment of the generous outlaw of Sherwood Forest, still occasionally bubbles up, as when the actor­director Sean Penn called Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, head of the world’s biggest supplier of banned narcotics, ‘a Robin Hood­like figure who provided much needed services in the Sinaloa mountains’. This is Robin Hood the ‘noble http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n04/james­meek/robin­hood­in­a­time­of­austerity 1/14 8/30/2016 James Meek · Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity · LRB 18 February 2016 robber’, in Eric Hobsbawm’s characterisation. In the final edition of his much reworked book Bandits, Hobsbawm bids farewell to the type. ‘In a fully capitalist society,’ he writes, the conditions in which social banditry on the old model can persist or revive are exceptional. They will remain exceptional, even when there is far more scope for brigandage than for centuries, in a millennium that begins with the weakening or even the disintegration of modern state power, and the general availability of portable, but highly lethal, means of destruction to unofficial groups of armed men. In fact, to no one’s surprise, in most ‘developed countries’ – even in their most traditionalist rural areas – Robin Hood is by now extinct. Sinaloa state in Mexico, from where El Chapo carried on his business until his recent recapture by the combined forces of the entertainment world and the Mexican marines, is still fertile ground for belief in the existence of the noble robber in a way present­day Nottinghamshire, or Missouri, or Victoria, once homes to the mythical Robin Hood and the real Jesse James and Ned Kelly, no longer are. Still, if we move out from Hobsbawm’s focus on the social bandit as actual individual, and consider the entire Robin Hood myth, the ideal remains familiar in our outlaw­free world. The myth requires a great mass of heavily taxed poor people who work terribly hard for little reward. The profits of their labour, and the taxes they pay, go to support a small number of lazy, arrogant rich people who live in big houses, wallow in luxury, and have no need to work. Any attempt to resist, let alone change, this unjust system is crushed by the weight of a vast private­public bureaucracy, encompassing the police, the courts, the prison system, the civil service, large property­owners and banks, all embodied in the ruthless figure of a bureaucrat­ aristocrat, personification of the careerist­capitalist elite, the sheriff of Nottingham. Two figures stand between the sheriff and the poor. One is the absent king. He carries a monarch’s title, but exists only to represent benign authority, order and justice, the kinder, fairer authority that existed before he went away, naively leaving the sheriff to govern in his name and pervert his wishes, the same authority he will restore when he returns. The other is Robin Hood, who defies the system, who stands up for the little people, who levels the playing field. He takes from the rich to give to the poor. It’s a plan. Taking from the rich to give to the poor has been, is and should be the way forward for an exploited majority against remote, unaccountable concentrations of extreme wealth and power. One word for it is ‘redistribution’. Robin Hood is a programme of the left. Robin Hood is Jeremy Corbyn. He’s Russell Brand. He’s Hugo Chávez. So it used to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the unemployed, the disabled, refugees – have http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n04/james­meek/robin­hood­in­a­time­of­austerity 2/14 8/30/2016 James Meek · Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity · LRB 18 February 2016 been put into the conceptual box where the rich used to be. It is they, the social category previously labelled ‘poor’, who are accused of living in big houses, wallowing in luxury and not needing to work, while those previously considered rich are redesignated as the ones who work terribly hard for fair reward or less, forced to support this new category of poor­who­ are­considered­rich. In this version the sheriff of Nottingham runs a ruthless realm of plunder and political correctness, ransacking the homesteads of honest peasants for money to finance the conceptual rich – that is, the unemployed, the disabled, refugees, working­ class single mothers, dodgers, scroungers, chavs, chisellers and cheats. In this version of the myth, Robin Hood is a tax­cutter and a handout­denouncer. He’s Jeremy Clarkson. He’s Nigel Farage. He’s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He’s by your elbow in the pub, telling you he knows an immigrant who just waltzed into the social security office and walked out with a cheque for £1000. He’s in the pages of the Daily Mail, fingering a workshy good­for­nothing with 11 children, living in a luxury house on the public purse. He’s sabotaging the sheriff of Nottingham’s wicked tax­gathering devices – speed cameras and parking meters. He’s on talk radio, denouncing inheritance tax. He’s winning elections. This is not a uniquely British phenomenon. The alternative version of the Robin Hood story is heard when left and right clash in Australia, Canada and the United States. An early version was the ‘welfare queen’ legend of America in the 1970s, popularised by Reagan. The ‘welfare queen’ was a mythical woman, usually portrayed as black and swathed in furs, who drove her Cadillac to the welfare office to pick up a dole from the government that amounted to $150,000 a year, tax­free. Today, the key signifier is the phrase ‘hardworking people’. With this expression, right­wing politicians embrace the entire spectrum of employed people with property, from a struggling small­time café owner with a bank loan to Britain’s richest beneficiary of inherited wealth, the multibillionaire Duke of Westminster (who does have a job, looking after his money), and class them as peasants, put­upon smallholders clawing a living from the soil in the face of the sheriff’s cruel tax raids. Here is the Conservative chancellor, George Osborne: We choose aspiration. This budget backs the self­employed, the small business owner and the homebuyer. We choose families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n04/james­meek/robin­hood­in­a­time­of­austerity 3/14 8/30/2016 James Meek · Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity · LRB 18 February 2016 hardworking taxpayers. The former Conservative prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, in 2015: The opposition will say, now, let’s spend and spend and spend. But, next year, we will use the fiscal room to do what we promised: cut taxes for hardworking Canadian families. The US Republican Marco Rubio, who wants to be president, speaking at a debate in 2015: Under my plan, no business, big or small, will pay more than 25 per cent flat rate on their business income.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 29Th April 2012 NEWS RELEASE CARDINAL O
    29th April 2012 NEWS RELEASE CARDINAL O’BRIEN BRANDS CAMERON’S OPPOSITION TO THE ROBIN HOOD TAX ‘SHAMEFUL’ The UK’s most senior Catholic, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, has branded David Cameron and his government’s opposition to a tiny tax on banks and the financial sector to help combat poverty as ‘shameful’. In a letter to the Prime Minister the Cardinal outlined his support for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, which calls for the UK Government to put in place a 0.05% tax on financial transactions such as bonds, stocks and derivatives. If implemented, it could raise £20 billion annually in the UK to be spent on poverty alleviation at home and overseas, and support communities affected by climate change. The Cardinal highlighted that thousands of SCIAF supporters across Scotland have signed up to the campaign, adding their voices to a widespread movement across Scotland, the UK and internationally, amid growing political support for such a tax. Cardinal O’Brien said: “At this difficult economic time more needs to be done to help the poor, both at home and abroad, as they are the ones hit the hardest by the fall-out of the global financial crisis. The banks and financial sector, which caused the problem, have a clear responsibility to pay their fair share. It is shameful that David Cameron is currently protecting his wealthy friends in the City by his opposition to this simple, fair and sustainable financial transactions tax.” In his letter to David Cameron (full text below) Cardinal O’Brien said: “The economy must be judged by what it achieves for the common good.
    [Show full text]
  • Financial Transactions Are So Mobile That an FTT in One Country Is Unenforceable and Will Simply Result in Trading Moving Overseas
    FACTS & MYTHS ABOUT A FINANCIAL TRANSACTION TAX Updated May 2013 What is a financial transaction tax (FTT)? The FTT (also known as a financial speculation tax , Wall Street trading tax, or Robin Hood tax) is a tiny fee – at rates of a fraction of a percent – on Wall Street trading of financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, derivatives, futures, options, and credit default swaps. What are the key facts about the FTT? • An FTT would raise at least tens of billions of dollars per year in badly needed revenue. This is a substantial amount, skimming the fat off of a sector of the economy that can afford to pay it. Some other revenue-raising options being discussed (such as a value-added tax) would fall much more on the middle class. • An FTT would reduce dangerous financial market speculation. Since it would hit high-volume, high-speed trading the hardest, the FTT would serve to discourage short-term speculation in financial markets as well as the proliferation of ever more complex derivatives. • An FTT would encourage longer-term productive investment. By reducing the volume and profitability of short-term trading that serves no productive purpose, the FTT would encourage Wall Street to find new ways to make money from longer-term productive investments. • An FTT would put Wall Street to work for Main Street. Reckless Wall Street gambling cost Americans trillions in bailouts, lost jobs and wealth, and cost states billions in lost revenue. The FTT would help put Wall Street to work rebuilding Main Street with revenue to create potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs and support critical public services and infrastructure.
    [Show full text]
  • GETTING STARTED a Robin Hood Tax on the Banks Has the Power to Raise Hundreds of Billions Every Year Globally
    ROBIN HOOD TAX: GETTING STARTED A Robin Hood Tax on the banks has the power to raise hundreds of billions every year globally. Money that could protect public services in the UK, help the poorest people at home and abroad and tackle climate change. ROBIN HOOD TAX AND WHAT WE WANT TO SEE: INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT: A BANK TAX THAT WOULD MAKE ROBIN WHY IT MATTERS. 3 PROUD. The effects of the banking crisis on developing countries We know that the Government could introduce didn’t get a huge amount of coverage in the UK. greater taxation on the financial sector to the tune Understandably enough, the focus was on the impact of £20bn a year. here, as the actions of a small minority wreaked havoc on the UK economy. But, unsurprisingly, a fire fuelled in wealthy countries also burnt millions of poor people – and MONEY FROM A ROBIN HOOD TAX GOING 3 TO THOSE WHO NEED IT. continues to do so. We suggest this money should be split: 50% to There are the inevitable pitfalls of globalisation, for starters. Spending falls in the UK. People buy fewer UK | 25% to Climate Change | 25% to International clothes. Shops order fewer clothes. Orders fall in factories Development. in poor countries. People are laid off and can’t find alternative work. And suddenly the global economic crisis THE UK BEING AN INTERNATIONAL 3 LEADER hits the market stall holder who used to sell lunches to the people in factories. And so on and so on. So we can help push for Europe-wide taxes on the The crisis also had a profound effect on poor countries financial sector.
    [Show full text]
  • STATEMENTS of SUPPORT for a FINANCIAL TRANSACTION TAX (FTT) Updated July 2013
    STATEMENTS OF SUPPORT FOR A FINANCIAL TRANSACTION TAX (FTT) Updated July 2013 Religious and Opinion Leaders Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations I support innovative financing solutions, such as a fair maritime bunker fuel tax, a levy on airline tickets, or the Financial 1 Transaction Tax. Boston Globe editorial board As Obama and other policymakers contemplate far-reaching changes to entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security, a financial transaction tax — which would simultaneously raise money and deter another crisis — has to be part 2 of the discussion. Al Gore, former U.S. Vice President We need policy changes, we need a tax on carbon and we need a tax on global transactions.3 Bob Herbert, former columnist at The New York Times While the fees would be a trivial expense for what the general public tends to think of as ordinary traders – people investing in stocks, bonds or other assets for some reasonable period of time – they would amount to a much heavier lift 4 for speculators, the folks who bring a manic quality to the markets, who treat it like a casino. Van Jones, author and President of Rebuild the Dream The Wall Street Tax… is common sense… Congress is about to face a telling choice. Will they vote to tax Wall Street gamblers in the 1%, or cut the Social Security checks of senior citizens in the 99%?5 Nicholas Kristof, columnist at The New York Times Impose a financial transactions tax. This would be a modest tax on financial trades, modeled on the suggestions of James Tobin, an American economist who won a Nobel Prize.
    [Show full text]
  • FINANCIAL TRANSACTION TAXES in THEORY and PRACTICE Leonard E
    FINANCIAL TRANSACTION TAXES IN THEORY AND PRACTICE Leonard E. Burman, William G. Gale, Sarah Gault, Bryan Kim, Jim Nunns, and Steve Rosenthal June 2015 DISCUSSION DRAFT - COMMENTS WELCOME CONTENTS Acknowledgments 1 Section 1: Introduction 2 Section 2: Background 5 FTT Defined 5 History of FTTs in the United States 5 Experience in Other Countries 6 Proposed FTTs 10 Other Taxes on the Financial Sector 12 Section 3: Design Issues 14 Section 4: The Financial Sector and Market Failure 19 Size of the Financial Sector 19 Systemic Risk 21 High-Frequency Trading and Flash Trading 22 Noise Trading 23 Section 5: Effects of an FTT 24 Trading Volume and Speculation 24 Liquidity 26 Price Discovery 27 Asset Price Volatility 28 Asset Prices and the Cost of Capital 29 Cascading and Intersectoral Distortions 30 Administrative and Compliance Costs 32 Section 6: New Revenue and Distributional Estimates 33 Modeling Issues 33 Revenue Effects 34 Distributional Effects 36 Section 7: Conclusion 39 Appendix A 40 References 43 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Burman, Gault, Nunns, and Rosenthal: Urban Institute; Gale and Kim: Brookings Institution. Please send comments to [email protected] or [email protected]. We thank Donald Marron and Thornton Matheson for helpful comments and discussions, Elaine Eldridge and Elizabeth Forney for editorial assistance, Lydia Austin and Joanna Teitelbaum for preparing the document for publication, and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation for funding this work. The findings and conclusions contained within are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the Tax Policy Center, the Urban Institute, the Brookings Institution, or their funders.
    [Show full text]
  • Is the Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) a Good Idea?
    Is the Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) a Good Idea? Nobel Prize Winner, James Tobin, proposed a tax on foreign exchange (forex) transactions in order to throw ‘sand into the wheels’ of finance. He believed that there was excessive, socially unuseful, trading and that too many bright young people were becoming forex traders. Advocation of taxing a wider range of financial transactions, a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT), has grown as financial transactions have proliferated over the years and Lord Adair Turner, Chairman of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), has echoed Tobin in alleging much of the trading in financial markets to be socially useless. In 2011, the EU proposed the imposition of an FTT in the EU. The City of London is strongly opposed and the Prime Minister, David Cameron, has vowed to protect the City from vindictive EU regulation and the FTT in the interests of the UK economy. Is he right to do so? The City and the wider financial sector, clearly does contribute considerable tax revenue to the UK and yet the government is committed to ‘rebalancing’ the economy to reduce dependence on the City in the wake of the Global Finance crisis. Further, 52% of City buildings are now owned by overseas interests, many in the EU. More importantly, the share of the City financial markets controlled by UK banks and other financial institutions is much smaller than that of European institutions and those for the US and Asian countries. The City is pre-eminently an international financial centre, and the largest one in Europe. The European Union countries thus have a vested interest in it competitiveness and a right to assure it is properly regulated to underpin financial stability, and the City benefits from UK’s membership of the EU.
    [Show full text]
  • The Struggle Over the Financial Transactions Tax - a Politico-Economic Farce
    A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Schulmeister, Stephan Working Paper The Struggle Over the Financial Transactions Tax - A Politico-economic Farce WIFO Working Papers, No. 474 Provided in Cooperation with: Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO), Vienna Suggested Citation: Schulmeister, Stephan (2014) : The Struggle Over the Financial Transactions Tax - A Politico-economic Farce, WIFO Working Papers, No. 474, Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO), Vienna This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/129019 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu ÖSTERREICHISCHES INSTITUT FÜR WIRTSCHAFTSFORSCHUNG WORKING PAPERS The Struggle Over the Financial Transactions Tax – A Politico-economic Farce Stephan Schulmeister 474/2014 The Struggle Over the Financial Transactions Tax – A Politico-economic Farce Stephan Schulmeister WIFO Working Papers, No.
    [Show full text]
  • Faqs on Financial Transaction Tax
    FAQs on Financial Transaction Tax What is a financial transaction tax? A financial transaction tax is a tiny fee – at rates of a fraction of a percent – on trades of financial instruments, such as stocks, bonds, and derivatives.1 Such taxes are promoted as having the dual benefits of discouraging short-term speculation while generating significant revenue. What is the experience with FTT to date? More than 30 countries currently have FTTs on particular asset classes that raise billions of dollars per year. These include many countries with robust and fast-growing financial markets, such as the UK, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, and India. From 1914 to 1966, the United States levied a stock transfer tax, which stood at 0.04% per transaction in 1966. What is the current state of the debate? While the Obama administration is not yet supportive, on January 12, 2015, the Democratic leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives announced support for FTT as a core element of a new tax reform plan. In Europe, 11 governments are moving forward to implement the first regional FTT. In January 2013, they received authorization to form a “coalition of the willing” to implement a coordinated FTT. These countries include: Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia, and Slovakia. The starting point for negotiations was a European Commission proposal for a tax of 0.1% on stock and bond trades and 0.01% on the notional value of derivatives. Trading platforms and clearing houses would collect the taxes and pass on revenue to national tax authorities.
    [Show full text]
  • Discussion Paper
    Discussion Paper Innovative Financing for Development: A New Model for Development Finance? January 2012 Innovative Financing for Development: A New Model for Development Finance? January 2012 Copyright © January 2012 United Nations Development Programme Bureau for Development Policy One United Nations Plaza New York, NY 10017, USA E-mail: [email protected] Web site: www.undp.org/poverty Acknowledgements This Discussion Paper was written by Gail Hurley, Bureau for Development Policy, UNDP. Research assistance was provided by Sofia Palli, also of the Bureau for Development Policy, UNDP. The author would like to thank the following people for their guidance and comments in the drafting of this paper: Paul Ladd (UNDP), Anne-Marie Sloth Carlsen (UNDP), Yanchun Zhang (UNDP) and Pedro Martins (Overseas Development Institute). Contact Information Gail Hurley, Poverty Group, Bureau for Development Policy, UNDP: [email protected] Cover Image Kletr/Shutterstock.com Disclaimer The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the institutions to which they are affiliated or the United Nations or their Member States, including UNDP. Contents List of Acronyms and Abbreviations 2 Abstract 3 1. Introduction 5 2. Innovative financing for development: what’s it all about? 7 3. Major innovative financing for development initiatives 9 3.1 Taxes, dues or other obligatory charges on globalized activities 10 3.2 Frontloading and debt-based instruments 11 3.3 State guarantees, public-private incentives, insurance and other market-based mechanisms 14 4. Innovative financing for development: initiatives under discussion 17 4.1 Financial transactions taxes 17 4.2 Carbon taxes 19 4.3 Solidarity Tobacco Contribution 19 4.4 IMF’s Special Drawing Rights 20 5.
    [Show full text]
  • Deloitte Proposal Document A4
    Global Tax Developments Quarterly Accounting for Income Taxes Summary of recent international tax developments that may have implications on accounting for income taxes under U.S. GAAP 1 April – 30 June 2014 9 July 2014 Issue 2014-2 Contents Introduction 1 Enacted tax law changes: 1 April to 30 June 2014 2 Enacted tax law changes that are now effective: 1 April to 30 June 2014 5 Enacted tax law changes that are effective as from 1 July 2014 6 On the horizon… 7 Did you know? 11 Example disclosures 21 Quick reference guide — Applicable income tax rates 22 Additional resources 26 Contact us 27 As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte Tax LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting. Global Tax Developments Quarterly Accounting for Income Taxes Introduction Introduction This document contains general information only and Deloitte is not, by means of this document, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This document is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor. The information contained in this document was not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used, for purposes of avoiding penalties or sanctions imposed by any government or other regulatory body.
    [Show full text]
  • The Robin Hood Tax: Everything You Need to Know
    THE ROBIN HOOD TAX: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW robinhoodtax.org.uk THE BIG IDEA CONTENTS The idea behind the Robin Hood Tax is simple: the financial sector has caused the greatest 01 What is the Robin Hood Tax? recession in a generation, affecting millions of Financial Transaction Taxes people here in the UK and around the world. The Why does the Robin Hood Tax campaign favour financial sector must now pay its fair share of Financial Transaction Taxes? the cost of sorting out the mess it created. The The Bank Levy Robin Hood Tax campaign is calling on the UK The Fat Tax government to raise an additional £20 billion a year from the banking industry – much needed 02 Why do we need the Robin Hood Tax? revenue that could fight poverty in the UK and How would the money be spent? overseas. It could help tackle climate change. At home Help protect schools and hospitals. Help stop Abroad massive cuts across the public sector. Help build Climate change new lives around the world…so what are we Why should some of this money be used waiting for? for fighting poverty and climate change in developing countries? The tax is just. The financial sector can afford it. And academic heavyweights have shown that 03 the systems are in place to collect it. Why should the financial sector be taxed? How did our financial sector come to be so WHAT’S THIS GUIDE FOR? bloated? This handy guide to the Robin Hood Tax is all you need to make you into a star Merry (Wo)Man.
    [Show full text]
  • The Taxcast, Edition #107 Transcript, 17 December 2020
    The Taxcast, edition #107 transcript, 17 December 2020 Naomi: “Hello and welcome to the Taxcast from the Tax Justice Network. We’re all about fixing our economies so they work for all of us. I’m your host Naomi Fowler. Make sure you never miss an episode and ping me an email on [email protected]. Coming up later:” Jim Henry: “It's a brilliant, easily collected tax. It doesn't cause any pain to investors. I mean there are damn few alternatives. Do you want us to really just fire all the state workers shutting down schools and laying off teachers, you know, how do you get Wall Street to pay its fair share here?!” Naomi: “We take a look at the transformative power of financial transactions taxes. There’s a chance that New York, home to two of the world's largest stock exchanges, could be about to set an important precedent. Two bits of good news to share with you this month: In the United States campaigners have been fighting to end secret company ownership in the US for years and years. Enough politicians have woken up to the fact that facilitating money laundering through financial secrecy is a national security threat. It means Congress has passed a defence bill which includes making corporations identify who owns and controls them. It also strengthens whistleblower protections. The bill has plenty of weaknesses BUT it’s an important step forward. And also Portugal wants the European Union’s council of member states to have a vote on public country-by-country reporting by multinationals.
    [Show full text]