Quote from Landis82:
You give a NY Times journalist far too much credit. He didn't even give any credit to James Tobin or John Maynard Keynes who first proposed this kind of a tax back in 1930. Instead, he lauded economist Dean Baker from the CEPR in Washington.
Again, this legislation was originally proposed in Congress by Reps DeFazio (OR) and Wellstone (MN) back in 2000 as a way to tax short-term, cross-border foreign exchange transactions to deter speculation. Some of the dumbest Reps in Congress ( such as Marcy Kaptur of Ohio) co-sponsored the bill.
Suffice to say, it lacked VOTES back then and it will lack VOTES now.
But once again, ET doesn't understand this kind of legislation.
In fact, it's practically a waste of time posting here.
I agree that it's way too early to hit the panic button on this thing, although worthy of our attention.
So far, Barack has shown himself smart enough and has been fairly centrist in his appointments. I seriously doubt he would do this, but you never know.