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Episode 157:

Deval Patrick has become very, very rich since leaving the post of Massachusetts governor. That’s what happens when you become a managing director of Bain Capital, one of the behemoths in the private equity industry. Patrick became rich working for a company—being a managing director of a company—that has screwed thousands of workers, especially 30,000 workers for Toys R Us who don’t have a job today because Bain Capital, with Patrick in the leadership, drove that company into liquidation. I talk about Bain Capital’s role in the demise of Toys R Us with Jim Baker, executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.

Over a decade ago, I started reading about something called a “Financial Transactions Tax”. It’s often also called a “Tobin Tax” after its creator, economist James Tobin, and it originally focused on taxing currency speculation. But a broader idea is popular: each time a Wall Street trade is made, a very, very, very, tiny tax is levied—which could raise hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps $1.5 trillion over the next decade. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) proposed the tax way back in 2008; Bernie Sanders has been for it, and made it part of his 2016 presidential campaign—and both of them are pushing some version of the tax right now in Congress. Jessica Schieder of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, who recently co-authored a paper on the financial transaction tax, chats with me about what the heck it is.

-- Jonathan Tasini
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