Article • Dean Baker’s Beat the Press
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NYT columnist Roger Cohen told readers that ideas like a:
“tax on global financial transactions, have been around for years but they’re almost impossible to apply.”
He wouldn’t say this if he was familiar with the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom has been taxing trades of stock for centuries. It raises between 0.2-0.3 percent annually ($30-$40 billion in the United States). There are many other financial transactions taxes in place in other financial markets.
It is not clear what makes Mr. Cohen think that a tax that raises tens of billions of dollars each year is “almost impossible to apply.”