Home » The Watercooler for 11/24/09 9:00 AM
The Watercooler for 11/24/09 9:00 AM
DFA's home for a free form, open-ended discussion of what matters most to committed progressive activists.
Watercooler resets everyday at 1am, 9am and 5pm. Past threads can be found in the Watercooler Archive
For the first time in 23 years, I will not be singing at the Wall Street station on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I won't be at Rector Street tomorrow. Today I look back at a job well done, with gratitude toward the hearts I've touched.
Today I'm 412 miles from the subway. The Love of a good woman rests in my heart and my new home is filled with the laughter of children, and a beautiful little girl called me Daddy for the first time when she hugged me this morning.
It's going to be a wonderful holiday season.
What does this represent? I'm just waking up
Per the stats Democracy For America reaches approximately 86,607 U.S. monthly people.
I did a compare to DailyKos. Per Quantcast DailyKos reaches: 1.2M Monthly US People.
Looks like you can dig down for some interesting quantitative data:
DFA: The site attracts a heavily female, mostly Caucasian, 50+, more educated audience.The typical visitor reads democrats.org, visits publicradio.org, and subscribes to National Geographic.
hil said (previous thread):
The time for a transaction tax has come and it is going to take a Senate filibuster to stop it. For a little populist joy instead of all that anger,take on derivitive speculation by the TARP boys and big oil at the same time.
drill baby drill.
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The link brings us to a transcript and video:
Congressman Peter DeFazio (OR-04) today released a proposed transaction tax on crude oil securities to pay for the deficiency in the Highway Trust Fund and to pay for the Surface Transportation Authorization Act of 2009.
“A transaction tax on crude oil securities will close the gap in funding a twenty-first century transportation system while lowering the price of oil.
This is a win/win,” DeFazio said. “If we put off this transportation authorization we will push off needed reform. Every day we wait people will sit in traffic instead of spending time with their families, every day people are not as safe as they could be because of our crumbling infrastructure, every day our economy suffers when our products sit in traffic jams.
Worst of all, every day we wait we continue to be more locked into inadequate funding and the failed policies of the Bush Administration. My proposal will not cost consumers one cent but will substantially increase our investment in our transportation infrastructure so we can move beyond the broken policies of the past toward a safer, cleaner more efficient transportation system for the 21st century.”
(more at the link from Phil above)
This tax will find broad support and is well documented in economic scholarly papers. In fact, NEC Chairman Larry Summers wrote a paper in 1989 in strong support of financial transaction taxes. It will likely find support from large consumers of oil, including airlines, trucking companies, and railroads, the marketers and retailers of oil and gasoline, and small oil producers.
back as I was interested in the origins of the transaction tax concept and to see where it has been practiced:
The idea is most closely associated with the late Nobel laureate for economics, James Tobin, and is often referred to as a Tobin Tax As he described it in Tobin (1978), “my proposal is to throw some sand in the wheels of our excessively efficient international money markets.” His primary motivation for the policy, however, was not to reduce volatility or finance development, but rather to enhance the effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policy. The “efficiency” of capital mobility was otherwise diminishing the effectiveness of those policies, especially monetary policy whose impact occurred largely through its effect on exchange rates and their impact on the trade balance.
However the idea can be traced back to at least 1936 when Keynes wrote in The General Theory about his opposition to the distortions of speculators in financial markets.
“The introduction of a substantial Government transfer tax on all transactions might prove the most serviceable reform available, with a view to mitigating the dominance of speculation over enterprise in the United States.”
Keynes’ views towards speculation were most likely formed prior to the passage of Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act 1934. That legislation introduced reporting requirements to financial markets in the U.S., which changed market fundamentals by providing for greater market transparency and thereby the basis for informed investing instead of that based on rumor and hearsay.
Even though Keynes visited New York City in the summer of 1934, it is most likely that the effect of this new legislation did not attract his attention, and neither the legislation nor its consequences were mentioned in the General Theory, the first draft of which was completed in late 1934.
The idea was more recently picked up and pursued by such notable economists as Larry Summers, who was later to become U.S. Treasury Secretary, and Joseph Stiglitz who was to become Chair of the Council of Economics Advisors and Nobel Laureate.
Summers has since changed his view. Whereas Keynes had based his argument on a “behavioralist” approach to financial markets, Summers and others based theirs on a “noise trader” model of financial markets.
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I found enough midnight reading opining on the pros/cons of the TT to last for an entire summer. There have also been studies done on the effects of a TT complete with opinions attacking study methods, etc.
A complicated issue but worth a pilot test, imo, and the TT on crude oil securities proposed by DeFazio sounds like as good a place as any to start.
Anyway, a cheerful good morning to all.
bbl.
- The Chinese always insisted there were NO taxes in China. . .
By puddle on Nov 24, 2009 11:30 AM ESTTook a bit of digging to find them. There *were* no sales, value added, or income taxes. What there were were "transaction" taxes right up to the consumer level. Every time a commodity changed hands, the transaction was taxed.
Interesting end user results, at times, lol! The ice skate situation was my fav. If you want ice skates, you need to go to one type of store to get the shoe, another for the blades, another for the shoelaces, and yet another for the screws to screw the blade to the shoe. None of these four mfgr's were willing to pay the transaction taxes to bring them altogether into a ready to go ice skate. . . Likelihood seemed to be that they'd then be to expensive to sell. . . .
When looking at issues like this my approach is to read the theory behind the idea and then see if the theory has been put into practice anywhere and what, if any, outcome data is available.
The goals, or intended benefits, of transactions taxes include the following:
1. Reduce the volume of foreign exchange (and possibly other) transactions, and thereby reduce the volatility of foreign exchange rates (and possibly other prices).
2. Reduce the returns to short-term speculation.
3. Reduce the amount of speculation and the incidents of speculative attacks on currency regimes.
4. Reduce the volume of speculative flows of “hot money” and other short-term investments.
5. Reduce the volatility of international capital flows and the price volatility in markets for foreign exchange and related financial instruments.
6. Encourage long-term relative to short-term investment.
7. Raise substantial revenues for development and other purposes.
(these links are but a few you'd find if you google around on the issue)
Got distracted elsewhere (ED and feminizing our males through plastic off-gassing and pollution). . . .
and now I've got to skeedaddle, for real.
Hope that when I return I'll get to learn what this means:
Got distracted elsewhere (ED and feminizing our males through plastic off-gassing and pollution). . . .
See you all later....hearts!
AT my dating site, there was a thread on ED in men over 45 (which is now huge). The men were blaming the women for not being sexy enough, and the women were blaming the men for not taking care of themselves.
This is part of my response:
I'm seeing a lot of blame the victim
here. I'd like to posit a larger picture (and a googling project for
you all). We already know that sperm counts have been dropping for
fifty years. We know that water pollution has been feminizing frogs and
fishes. We know that at least two different kinds of plastics, both
overwhelmingly in our everyday environment, feminize our own baby boys.
When I was a child, milk came in glass bottles, then in waxed paper
cartons, now in plastic lined paper/or plastic bottles; soda comes in
plastic; cans are lined in plastic; baby formula in plastic lined cans
into plastic baby bottles; plastics in our nail polish, shampoo,
drinking water; storage is plastic. Plastic off-gasses in our
refrigerators and microwaves. These plastics act as pseudo-estrogens,
women who are over-estrogenized give birth to feminized sons. Who are
then fed these same pseudo-estrogens for the rest of their growing up
years. Do we honestly believe *none* of this has any effect on us, the
grownups? What about our grandchildren? The world's grandchildren? The
human race?
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