Obama is proposing to impose this tax on seniors who had nothing to do with causing the crisis, while he leaves Wall Street untouched!
To put this into proper perspective, understand that even a very modest tax on nothing more than financial speculation could raise more than $150 billion a year or $1.5 trillion over the course of a decade. Is Obama considering such a tax? Of course not -- a financial speculation tax (FST) has never even been mentioned in his debt discussions.
By contrast, the European Union has been actively debating the imposition of a FST ever since the crisis began. In fact, the European Parliament voted for such a tax by a margin of more than 3 to 1. And the United Kingdom has had an FST for decades. Why? Because it raises the US equivalent (relative to the size of the British economy) of almost $40 billion a year -- just by taxing stock trades. Even the International Monetary Fund has come out in support of increased taxes on the financial sector. And yet Republicans in the US scream bloody murder if such a move is even hinted at, here in the states.
Presumably, the continuing political influence of the financial industry explains why so few of our bought-and-paid-for members of Congress dare mention an FST. After all, Obama installed a former director of Morgan Stanley, Erskine Bowles, as head of his deficit commission. (Revealing, isn't it, how so many Wall Street honchos have been invited into the Obama administration?)
So need we look any further for an explanation of why Obamacon is about to gut Social Security and Medicare in response to Wall Street's wreckage of the economy?! The sick reality is that the average worker and retiree (ever more powerless in Obama's America) will then be forced to pay the price for the damage that the Wall Street crew did to the economy! Surely you don't expect the Wall Street rich to pay for it themselves!
So much for "democracy' in America. So much for candidate Obama's masterful con job, that got him into the White House.
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