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Bill Nighy on ‘Robin Hood tax’… March 2, 2011

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, The Left.
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Thanks to Donnacha for forwarding this…

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1. Ciarán - March 2, 2011
2. Ramzi Nohra - March 2, 2011

World
This is irrelevant to the post but I saw this about musical flirtation with far-right imagery and thought you may be interested in it:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/02/galliano-racism-cabaret-camp

We have discussed some of the issues here before.

In fact while we are on the subject i meant to flag this up to you before (about the supposed working class roots of Oi!)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/18/oi-cockney-rejects-garry-bushell-interview

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3. Tomboktu - March 2, 2011

There are two distinct things in the idea of a robin hood tax, and it would be good to distinguish them:

  • (a) a tax on (certain types of) transactions by and/or profits of financial institutions
  • (b) how the income generated by that tax is used

    • .

    I’m a little bit (but not completely) wary about packaging the two together. Every tax cent raised should be used for a socially useful purpose. More significantly, a ‘charity’ model of how tax is spent on social services undermines a rights-based approach to social and public services: “if you can’t afford the fees for this school, the Sate will pay for that other school over there”; “if you can’t afford the Blackrock Clinic, the State will pay a nurse in St James’s or Beaumont, whom you can queue to see”…]

    As it happens, there is a real opening to push for a Robin Hood tax in the EU at the moment, and I posted an article about that here last week. I don’t know if it was my uninspiring writing style, or the distractions of the eve of polls, but nobody commented at the time. The gist is: the European Commission is considering new taxes on financial institutions, and there is a p[ublic consultation on the idea and the forms it could take that runs to early April. as I said last week:

    I hope … bodies like TASC, unions, the parties of the Left, and the MEPs (both ongoing and soon to be former :) ) make submissions.

    Reply

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