Rich CEO Investor: Tax World's Richest To Raise $10 TRILLION For The People

[tabatha]

Willie Sutton, the infamous bank robber, could not have said it better than Hassan Heikal. And Heikal is no bank robber—he’s the chief executive of EFG Hermes, which describes itself as the premier investment bank in the Middle East. But, like Sutton, he knows where the money is—and that’s where he wants to go to ease the austerity sweeping the world, and austerity he does not like and finds disastrous. He has a solution, one that won’t solve all the ills of the world. But, it will take $5-$10 trillion out of the pockets of the wealthiest people in the world and put that money towards halting the massive hurt descending on people because of the austerity obsession.

I caught this in yesterday’s Financial Times. Heikal starts by articulating what some voices—not those obsessed with hammering the people with austerity to pay for the robbery of the last 30 years nor those obsessed in our country with a non-existent debt and deficit “crisis”—have been saying for a long time:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/23/1039287/-Rich-CEO-Investor:-Tax-Worlds-Richest-To-Raise-$10-TRILLION-For-The-People

[dkf]

1. Actually he's saying to tax to pay down debt so basically it will go back into their pockets anyway.

[quaker bill]

2. Yes, with exception

You could get to the same place with a write down, but anything that seems like a default would be potentially destabilizing. Second, while the lions share of debt is held by the 1 percent, a significant portion is on the books of the social security "trust fund", and some small portion of it is held by the 99 percent, like the t-bill I used to fund my daughter's college education. Some portion is in peoples 401Ks, so a targeted tax would be more discriminate than a write down.

A one off wealth tax would not be a bad idea. It would sort of press the reset buttion to some extent.

Now if you tossed in a financial transactions tax, something along the lines of a 0.5 to 1.0 percent on each market trade, one could raise alot of revenue at first, but largely would reduce the market volatility that arises from HFT on the margin. Not too long ago, brokerage fees were sufficiently high to dampen this sort of stuff, today with $7.95 electronic trades, money can be made from tiny intra-session moves in the course of minutes. This sort of thing was never the intent of the stock or commodities markets and turns the whole thing into a casino. Now if you have to start holding long enough to make a couple of percent for the most part this would change decision making dynamic.

[dkf]

3. This is worldwide so it's not about social security or anything.

He is trying to address the worldwide problem of sovereigns who have taken on too much debt. While the causes may be different from country to country, the result is the same...too much sovereign debt.

[quaker bill]

5. I get that

Here, social security holds a great deal of the debt, elsewhere it is held in other manners. The idea has merit because a tax is far better than a write down as a means to get to the same place.

[Scuba]

4. "Time to press the reset button". I like it. Mind if I steal it?