Apr 15 2011
One thousand economists have signed a letter calling on G20 finance ministers, who are meeting in Washington this week, to support the "so-called 'Robin Hood tax' or Tobin tax on transactions in financial markets," the Guardian reports.
"The economists argue that even if such a tax was levied at just 0.05%, it could raise hundreds of billions of dollars, which could be ploughed into development projects," according to the Guardian. "The financial crisis has shown us the dangers of unregulated finance, and the link between the financial sector and society has been broken. It is time to fix this link and for the financial sector to give something back to society," the economists write in the letter. They add that this sort of tax is "technically feasible" and "morally right."
Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Dani Rodrik from Harvard, and Ha-Joon Chang of Cambridge are some of the economists who signed the letter (Stewart, 4/13).
The letter "has also been sent to Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft who has been asked by the G20 to consider ways to raise money for climate change," the Telegraph reports (Armitstead, 4/14). The complete list of signatories is available on the Guardian's website (4/13).
 This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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