AUTOUR DE LA TAXE TOBIN LES ECONOMISTES PEUVENT AGIR
CD
VON/FROM : Peter Wahl
Dear friends,
France and Germany succeeded to get the proposal of a financial
transaction tax de facto into the Pittsburgh Declaration of the G20.
The IMF is mandated to prepare for the next summit a report on
instruments to make the financial industry "/a fair and substantial
contribution toward paying for any burdens associated with government
interventions to repair the banking system/.« (Point 16 of the »Leaders
declaration).
This is a positive step.
As the head of the IMF, the French socialist Dominique Strauss
Kahn, can be considered to be open to a Transaction Tax, we can expect
that the proposal will be carried on. Not only Sarkozy but already
Mitterand and Chirac were supporters of a similar tax, the Tobin Tax.
The Tobin Tax, however, had only currency transactions as tax basis,
whereas the Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) encompasses also bonds,
equities, derivatives etc.
There is an extraordinary opportunity for civil society to make the
FTT one of her prominent points to organize pressure from below in the
time to come and to make the FTT not the solution for everything but a
spearhead of campaigning.
The tax offers a lot of economic and politic leverage :
1. It has a regulatory potential. It contributes to curb
speculation, will shrink the financial sector and thus contribute to
breaking the dominance of finance over the whole economy and society.
2. It has a strong distributionary, or social equity dimension by
making pay those, who were benefitting from the system and are
responsible for the crash.
3. As the issue of public debt and who will pay for the bill off
the crisis will be on top of the agenda in the coming years, with
pressure to cut public expenditure and in particular social budgets, we
have with the FTT a powerful tool to say « Let them pay for the crisis ».
The FTT is a powerful alternative in that respect.
4. There is a strong political momentum with Sarkozy, Merkel,
Austria supporting the idea. Also the president of the EU Commission,
Barroso, and commissioner Almunia are in favor, as well as the British
foreign minister Miliband.
5. There are already a lot of allies in trade unions, churches and
NGOs for a currency transaction tax and the media are acquainted with
it. 6. There is already a lot of expertise, studies etc. on the issue
on which we can build. So, we have not to start from scratch.
At the moment I see three main challenges :
a. All the new supporters of the FTT have an inbuilt
self-destroying mechanism in the proposal : they all say that the
proposal is only feasible on global level. This is wrong. Of course, it
wold be nice to have the FTT globally, but it would already have a
strong impact if it is implemented in one major currency zone, for
instance the Euro zone. It is the same as with the Kyoto protocol, you
can do something without the US having on board. We have to make this
argument strong. b. Civil society has to be flexible and to adjust its
strategy to the new situation. This does not mean, that people give up
their own agenda, but that we find ways to combine in an intelligent
way with our usual work. We should not just do business as usual and
try to reshuffle our agenda and resources. c. Nobody of us loves the
Merkels, Sarkozys e tutti quanti, and I know how difficult it is to
admit that they could do something which is not per se an evil. But if
there is such a clear split inside the elites we have to make those
positions strong which have been ours since ten years, even if we
Merkel and Sarkozy support it.
Kind regards
Peter Wahl
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