Professor Frank Stilwell promotes Financial Transaction Tax
In the lead-up to the national Tax Forum on 4-5 October, the invited participants of this event have been able to submit statements of what they believe are the reform priorities for the Australian tax system.
Frank Stilwell, Professor of Economics at the University of Sydney with over thirty years of teaching experience and well known advocate of social justice and economic sustainability, is one of the 156 participants at the Tax Forum. He is advocating for financial transaction taxes and states:
“… taxation of international financial transactions could be an important step towards creating more economic stability. Speculative capital flows, sometimes of a remarkably short-term character, have proliferated in markets for foreign exchange, futures and other derivatives during the last two decades.
This indeed is casino capitalism, the pursuit of profits without production, producing regressive redistribution of wealth and generating recurrent instability.
One of the many political economic lessons arising from the recent, and in some other countries ongoing, Global Financial Crisis is that the ‘efficient markets’ hypothesis has no firm foundation in reality.
Speculative markets proliferate without regard to economic stability and efficiency unless there are appropriate regulatory and taxation structures in place.
It is some four decades since the distinguished US economist James Tobin proposed a tax on international financial transactions for this purpose, and there has been growing support for it among a wide range of observers of, even participants in, financial markets.
A strong international campaign has been developed for what has come to be known as ‘the Robin Hood tax’ because its effects would be conducive to progressive income redistribution on a global scale…
It warrants serious attention in proposals for tax reform and signals the need to extend international cooperation in creating conditions for more economic stability, equality and balanced development.” (emphasis added).
