I can at best “guesstimate” that for the US the transaction tax base is roughly 50 times GDP = $775 Trillion. If the US would adopt an APT tax of 10 basis points, .1% (not 1%) (hopefully in negotiations with UK and EU and best with G20) that would reduce the taxable base by perhaps 30% by eliminating short term trades that would no longer be profitable. That would reduce the tax base to $420 trillion and raise very roughly..an estimated $400 billion in added revenue. With luck, one could eliminate most tax expenditures yielding roughly $ 1 trillion which will be reduced to at most $500 Billion by rate reductions for corporate and personal incomes to get acceptance of the APT tax. So my best guess….is that we could raise roughly 1 trillion per year in added revenue.
The “shadow banking system” can broadly be described as “credit intermediation involving entities and activities outside the regular banking system”. Although intermediating credit through non-bank channels can have advantages, such channels can also become a source of systemic risk, especially when they are structured to perform bank-like functions (e.g. maturity transformation and leverage) and when their interconnectedness with the regular banking system is strong. Therefore, appropriate monitoring and regulatory frameworks for the shadow banking system needs to be in place to mitigate the build-up of risks.
Does Sugar Kill? How the Sugar Industry Hid the Toxic Truth
For decades, the industry kept scientists from asking: Does sugar kill?
GARY TAUBES and CRISTIN KEARNS COUZENS – AlterNet (U.S.)
November 15, 2012 |
This article first appeared in Mother Jones Magazine. Get your magazine subscription here.
Click on Image to Enlarge
ON A BRISK SPRING Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in ” the forging of public opinion. ” The trade group had recently pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose weight had been called out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see where that trend might lead. As John “JW” Tatem Jr. and Jack O'Connell Jr., the Sugar Association's president and director of public relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the coup they'd just pulled off.
The Rolling Jubilee is just getting started and so far it has raised over $6 Million, which will be used to wipe out medical debt for random Americans. Cutting debt while helping those in need, now there's something everyone can agree on.
Phi Beta Iota: What we find utterly fascinating here is the discount rate on personal debt in the USA: 4%. They have bought and dismissed $6 million in debt for a cost of $304,850. 4% — at a time when most Americans are being hounded by debt collectors, and nothing is being done to help the average person. How hard would it be for the President to sponsor a Jubilee Bill at this rate — instead of trillions for the banks, a billion or less, at 4% [96% leverage] wipes out all individual and small business debt in the USA. A big idea. Mr. President?
I wrote this with John Kerry and Michele Flourney in mind, but regardless of who is eventually made Secretary of Defense, the core concept remains: the center of gravity for massive change in the US Government and in the nature of how the US Government ineracts with the rest of the world, lies within the Department of Defense, not the Department of State.
John Kerry, Global Engagement, and National Integrity
It troubles me that John Kerry is resisting going to Defense when he can do a thousand times more good there instead of sitting at State being, as Madeline Albright so famously put it, a “gerbil on a wheel.” Defense is the center of gravity for the second Obama Administration, and the one place where John Kerry can truly make a difference. Appoint Michele Flournoy as Deputy and his obvious replacement down the road, and you have an almost instant substantive make-over of Defense. Regardless of who ends up being confirmed, what follows is a gameplan for moving DoD away from decades of doing the wrong things righter, and toward a future of doing the right things affordably, scalably, and admirably.
Note to readers: this blaster contains two clearly marked inserts that were not in my Time essay. Also, in introducing Seymour Melman's important work below, I should have mentioned that it was Melman's considered belief in the possibility of putting together a political coalition to facilitate the conversion of the defense industry to civilian production. Conversion is a exceedingly complex and highly controversial subject; and to date, conversion has not been accomplished in any meaningful way, but that does not mean conversion is impossible. Here, that possibility or impossibility is not at issue in this essay; my focus is on the very short term: namely how in the next few months the defense dependency may induce politicians who have been captured by the defense industry to react to the looming budget sequester by flinging the middle class off the fiscal cliff.
This recent essay – America the Third World Nation in Just 4 Easy Steps – describes how our political addiction to the free-trade ideology of neoliberal economics has helped to de-industrialize America and thereby impoverish much of the American middle class.
My essay describing the decline of manufacturing employment will give you a sense of the mind-boggling magnitude of what has happened. While “4 Easy Steps” makes passing references to the increasing dependence of the manufacturing sector on military spending, as well as the financialization of economy (but not the latter’s Siamese-twin ‘managerialism’), the authors do not develop these points. Without implying any criticism of this excellent essay, my aim today is to tweak your interest in these omissions, particularly America’s defense dependency.
The late Professor Seymour Melman of Columbia University wrote a prescient book, Profits Without Production (Knopf, 1983) that explained how the militarization and managerialization of our economy were becoming the central causes of the decline in America’s manufacturing competitiveness. This decline started in the 1970s, but Melman showed how it grew out of seeds planted by the permanent military mobilization of a huge defense industry in the 1950s.
The birth date for the permanent war economy was 30 September 1950.
On that day, President Harry Truman officially signed NSC-68, a document that became a blueprint for the containment strategy for waging the Cold War. Central to this strategy was the establishment of a large, permanently-mobilized defense manufacturing sector.
They justified the permanent mobilization, in part, with an economic rationalization reflecting their contention that the World War II production miracle proved the multiplier effects of Military Keynesianism, or in their words: “the economic effects of the [NSC-68] program might be to increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes.”
The post-WWII economic boom in the U.S. (with our competitive performance aided in part by the lingering effects of the WWII damage to the world’s other major industrial economies) hid the adverse economic effects of the economic diversion attending to the permanent war economy unleashed by NSC-68. Nevertheless, by early 1961, the accumulating damage caused by the diversion was apparent to some insiders: President Eisenhower famously warned the nation about the rise of misplaced power posed by the rise of a large permanent standing arms industry, which he said, pointedly, was new in our national experience.
The accumulating damage wrought by the permanent war economy started to accelerate in the 1970s, and by 1980, the cancer metastasized: militarization and managerialization began to openly thrive at the expense of the traditional high-wage manufacturing sector, in effect, siphoning off money flows via a combination of government handouts and favorable tax treatment that in effect rewarded both the looting of the tax base and the draining of competitiveness and ingenuity from the civilian manufacturing sector (via the increased defense subsidy, leveraged buyouts, offshoring of jobs, emphasizing short-term focus to pump stock prices, etc.)
