This has to be by far the most ridiculous and ignorant pile of paragraphs ever put together regarding the present state of the economy and “fixing it”.
It’s almost childlike. Oh wait it’s from a Firedoglake Socialist with the Hots for FDR.
Firedoglake » How To Reduce Oil and Food Prices
So. How do you fix this? As with many problems the world and the US has, it isn’t a problem we don’t pretty much know how to solve, we just don’t have the willpower to wring speculative excess out of the system.
1) You put the major banks and Wall Street Brokerage, which are insolvent, into receivership. You sue for the return of all bonuses. You let the investors, who took the profits, take a full 100% loss on their stock holdings. You start, slowly, unraveling the swaps, CDOs and so on, and you force people to take their losses.
2) You have the government, in effect, take over the mortgage market.
3) Don’t allow leverage beyond 10X max. Don’t allow already leveraged money to be leveraged again.
4) Implement a Tobin tax, that is a tax on every single transaction. Tobin originally suggested it just for foreign currency transactions but at this point putting it on anything but plain vanilla bond and stock transactions would be wise. This will raise hundreds of billions very quickly, will make speculation less profitable and will take money out of the hands of the rich.
5) Implement a strong progressive tax which taxes income, all income, over 1 million dollars, at at least a 90% rate. This must include taxing unearned income at the same rate as earned income. Again, the idea is to get money out of the hands of the rich who have no productive use for it.
So let’s get this straight, this genius wants to enact the very same principals that kept his country in the great depression until we entered a war, WWII that is.
One could argue using liberal progressive talk that “war profiteering”, the Lend - Lease act with Great Britain and Allies, was one of the few things holding the economy up until we entered WWII.
Next thing you know it will be illegal to own gold again.
When are the progressive democrats going to realize that over taxation, which sends manufacturing over seas, environmental shackles which prevents us from drilling for and refining oil and social programs have done more damage to this country’s economy than the Real Estate bubble ever could.
Let’s not even talk about the BILLIONS of dollars illegal immigrants take out of our economy by sending it “home”.
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