In Washington, D.C. today, Jobs with Justice Executive Director Sarita Gupta joined Wall Street and economic experts and consumer, development and global health advocates for a press conference to push for a Financial Speculation Tax.
“Jobs with Justice will be in the streets today in over 40 cities demanding that Congress tax Wall Street to pay for jobs,” said Gupta. “Wall Street bankers recklessly gambled away our economy, and they should be made to pay for recovery programs like the Local Jobs for America Act.”
The group called on President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to embrace this tax and called on Congress to move swiftly to enact it. The tax is a very small levy on financial short-term transactions, which will curb excessive speculation by Big Banks, but with minimal impact on long-term investors. It also would raise an estimated $100 billion a year for job-creation, important public goods like investment in rebuilding our nation’s crumbling infrastructure and clean energy, and providing global health and development aid.
John Fullerton, a former Managing Director at JPMorgan, explained that the tax is needed for three reasons: 1) to combat the short-termism rampant in our current financial markets, 2) to improve market resiliency with minimal impacts on efficiency, and 3) to raise badly needed funds for our country.
“The reckless behavior of a severely bloated financial sector has given us the worst economic downturn in 70 years,” said Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “A tax on financial speculation would raise close to $100 billion a year, while downsizing the financial sector and restoring it to its proper role in the economy, which will help ensure that this sort of calamity does not happen again.”
Momentum for enacting a financial speculation tax is already strong in Europe. It will be on the agenda at the Group of Twenty (G-20) finance ministers’ meeting in Washington on April 23 and the G-20 leaders’ meeting in Canada in June.
[...] Wall Street and economic experts and consumer, development, and global health advocates for a press conference to push for a Financial Speculation Tax. The group called on President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to embrace [...]