I'm no tax expert, but...

Barack Obama’s at some fancy G-20 Summit in Cannes right now, pissing me off.

Nineteen countries – including Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia and Saudi Arabia – and the European Union are meeting right now to discuss financial markets and the world economy. Some are pushing for a global “financial transactions tax” – a small tax on trades of stocks, bonds and derivatives – but the Obama administration opposes it.

Bill Gates

Bill Gates – who would have been Forbes magazine’s richest man in the world in 2011 if he hadn’t poured $28 billion into his charitable foundation, which promotes health and fights hunger and poverty around the world – supports an FTT. (I’ve got to think Gates and his chum, Warren Buffett – who’s worth around $47 billion – know a little bit about finance.)

The governments of France and Germany support it.

The hippies occupying Wall Street support it.

Even the Archbishop of Canterbury supports a financial transactions tax. (I concede that the leader of the Church of England might lack credibility when it comes to international finance but it’s fun to mention the dude.)

Michael Moore

Anytime you have Germany’s conservative Angela Merkel and liberal rabble-rouser Michael Moore singing the same song, you might want to give it a listen.

Here’s the rub: an FTT won’t really work unless it’s adopted globally because activity would move to regions that don’t assess the tax.

Earlier this week, two U.S. lawmakers – Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Representative Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) introduced legislation that proposes a 0.03 percent tax on financial transactions that could raise $150 billion annually to “invest in our future, our infrastructure and our middle class.”

That’s a lot of clams for bridge, school and road repair. That’s a lot of “put people back to work” cash.

DeFazio points out that the United Kingdom already imposes a 0.25 percent transaction tax on the sale or purchase of stocks which “has very little impact on people who buy stock with the intent of holding it for a long period of time” but will deter those who participate in high frequency trades that exacerbate or lead to market crashes. The policy, he says, helps return Wall Street to its days as a place “where people with good ideas go to raise capital” for production rather than a place for “gambling” schemes.

Of course the financial industry opposes the proposal, calling it “a sales tax on investors” and insisting it would impede the efficiency of markets. These are the same dishonest pricks who insist that the richest one percent are “job creators” and government regulation is what’s killing the economy.

I wish I were surprised that Obama is siding with these guys, but I’m not.

I woke up this morning to someone on NPR pointing out that the incomes of the richest one percent have quadrupled in the last decade while everybody else’s have remained stagnant.

So by all means, let’s keep reaffirming our national motto and trying to control women’s bodies.

Sources: Wall Street Journal, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Thinkprogress.com, Reuters.