In anticipation of tomorrow night's budget, the CEC would like to remind Treasurer Joe Hockey of this handy tip for raising revenue, issued in a 7 May 2014 CEC media release:
The solution to the national budget deficit that actually helps people, instead of killing them, is a tax on the damaging financial speculation that drains the wealth out of the real economy.
A 0.1% tax on financial speculation is a tiny little tax, only $1 on every $1,000 of transaction, compared to the “great big” taxes such as, say, the GST ($100 on every $1,000).
BUT… it will raise a massive amount of money: $135 billion in one year—enough to cover the $123 billion of deficits that Hockey is projecting over the next four years!
This is because the scale of financial speculation that it will tax is mind-boggling.
Australia’s annual gross domestic product is $1.4 trillion; by contrast, the Australian Financial Markets Association (AFMA) annual report reveals that for the year 2012-13 total turnover of all financial markets was more than $135 trillion!
Virtually none of this $135 trillion turnover had anything to do with the real economy: government bonds, which the government issues to borrow money, accounted for $1.7 trillion of it; turnover in shares on the stock market was $1.15 trillion; and foreign exchange on the import and export of goods and services was $620 billion.
The balance of over $130 trillion was in all manner of speculation in derivatives—futures, options and swaps—and speculation in foreign exchange (only 1.4% of foreign exchange trade relates to import/export).
Win-Win
The 0.1 per cent speculation tax is a win-win: not only will it raise more than enough tax revenue, it will kill the speculation it is taxing.
A tax of $1 on every $1000 will not be a burden on genuine investors in stocks and bonds and genuine foreign exchange transactions.
It will, however, destroy the “business model” of the financial speculators, who rapidly buy and sell and buy and sell on massive volumes in order to skim profits from driving down prices for producers and driving up costs to consumers. It will end this unproductive, predatory and parasitical paper-shuffling that is draining the life out of the real economy.
Consequently, it will be a short-term source of tax revenue, but the real economy—farming and manufacturing production, skilled trades, etc.—will, freed from this burden, be able to prosper, which will expand the normal tax base.
That this 0.1% speculation tax will solve the current budget deficit is a bonus; its intention is to protect the real economy from financial predators, like the CEC’s other policies of a Glass-Steagall separation of retail from investment banks, and national banking."
