Financial Transaction Tax
What is a Financial Transaction Tax?
It is simply a very small percentage of the total amount of your everyday purchases.
Why am I even promoting the idea? Don't we already have enough taxes draining our slowly dwindling weekly wages?
Yes we do, but there is some light at the end of the tunnel - if the powers that be would simply get their head out of where the sun will never shine.
According to the Reserve Bank of Australia...
Page 15 states, in a table entitled Cash Withdrawals Year to March 2004 (no mention of the start, but presumably, March 2003?) there was, wait for it, $142,534,000,000 - yes, $142 billion dollars withdrawn from ATM's (your own, and 'foreign' ones), EFTPOS cash-out and cash-out + purchases, and credit card cash advances.
$142 billion dollars. The report obviously is slanted to the types of outlets that we all get our cash from, but eventually, that cash will be spent within the economy.
But if we look at the spreadsheet, kindly also provided by the RBA (they really hang themselves don't they - or should I say, they really hang the government, don't they?) at:
http://www.rba.gov.au/statistics/tables/xls/c07hist.xls
it shows that the total of interbank settlements for November 2012 stood at:
$150 billion dollars.
That's right - just for the month of November 2012.
That includes all financial transactions being cleared through various systems such as SWIFT, RITS, Austraclear etc, each and every month.
Check it out - $158 billion for Sep 2012, $151 billion for Oct 2012, and $150 billion during Nov 2012.
Now, imagine a financial transaction tax on those amounts - lets pick a number - a third of one percent or 0.33% .
Lets do the math.
$158,000,000,000 is $158 billion dollars, the same amount cleared through the various financial clearing houses as described by the Reserve Banks' own spreadsheet for September 2012.
(158,000,000,000 / 100) * .33 = $521,400,000 or $521 million dollars per month, directly into the Australian government coffers (for the month of Sep 2012)
Lets total the 2011-2012 financial year (from the spreadsheet above)
July 2011 - $164 billion
August 2011 - $164 billion
September 2011 - $168 billion
October 2011 - $173 billion
November 2011 - $164 billion
December 2011 - $181 billion (Xmas time!)
January 2012 - $148 billion
February 2012 - $149 billion
March 2012 - $157 billion
April 2012 - $167 billion
May 2012 - $152 billion
June 2012 - $168 billion
Lets total up the entire 2011-2012 financial year in settled payments throughout the banking system in Australia. (I don't even think my calculator is up to the task, but I'm sure Google can tell me what sort of number I'm looking at...)
It turns out to be:
1 961 753 000 000
one trillion, nine hundred and sixty-one billion, and seven hundred and fifty-three million dollars.
That's a lot of dosh!
So I wonder what 0.33% of that is?
| 6,473,784,900 |
6 billion dollars
And that's at just one third of one percent.
How about we ask for ten percent of that, just like the GST (don't worry, the GST will be history after we look at the result!)
Ooooh! Now that's nice:
| 196,175,300,000 |
$196 billion
$196 billion dollars
Seems almost as much as what the present government has borrowed and what we'll have to pay back someday.
So, they could recoup $196 billion dollars out of the Australian economy in a year - and that's without the GST, without payroll tax, without the MRRT, without the carbon "price" - just by simply creaming off the top of what normal Australians, and Australian businesses, pay each and every month, to one another!
Am I mad?
Why hasn't this been implemented?
