Administration Bank Tax Plan: An Empty Populist Gesture by Design?
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/01/administration-bank-tax-plan-an-empty-populist-gesture-by-design.html#commentsWith its talk of new taxes on banks, is Team Obama reverting to its now well established pattern of crony capitalist giveaways with the occasional phony populist reform as an increasingly ineffective disguise? The extraordinarily unenthusiastic, perhaps inept by design, discussion of its plans to tax banks in some yet undetermined manner certainly says so.
First, let’s consider Exhibit 1: the truly piss poor job the Obama Administration did of selling its health care reform plan. Recall the remarkable disconnect of people saying they did not want “socialized” health care, yet they also did not want Medicare touched. It does not take Madison Avenue credentials to see the sales pitch: “We already have successful, popular, government funded health care in the US. It’s called Medicare. We want to build and improve on that. Here’s how.” Did we see anything like this from the Administration message-meisters? And where were the President’s famed communication skills? Funny how he seems unable to articulate a vision that will actually shift public opinion.
If you believe in neuro-linguistic programming, Obama’s formal presentation often uses what I believe NLP calls hypnotic speech. It sounds wonderfully uplifting while you are listening, but when you get done, you scratch your head, because there was so much abstraction and imagery relative to content that very little of substance is said. Despite its creepy sounding name in the NLP lexicon, it’s common in political speeches. The audience is left with a favorable impression of the speaker but not much in the way of concrete ideas that it can recall, which is perfect for campaigners who studiously want to avoid making promises. Hypnotic speech is good for creating a positive image, not good at all for conveying content of any complexity.
Now before we get to the “how” of any bank taxes, something Team Obama clearly has not figured out, we also need a “why”: why are these taxes warranted and necessary now? Well, the Adminsitration is either punting (as usual) in giving a rationale, or worse, is just ‘fessing up loudly and clearly that it really does not have much appetite for this exercise, but is responding to its sliding poll ratings.
Get a load of these remarks from the usual MSM suspects. In each case, we have chosen the first sentence which says why the Administration is planning to move ahead:
Wall Street Journal: “The White House hopes the fee will soothe the public’s anger at financial firms.”
Financial Times (subhead on first page summary): “Aim to address anger over bonuses.” From the story itself: “The proposal comes as the administration faces increasing pressure from Democrats in Congress to take punitive action against banks. The White House is trying to contain anger in a week in which banks will begin announcing billions of dollars in new bonuses.”
New York Times (which does give two objectives): “The general idea is to devise a levy that would help reduce the budget deficit….But the president also has a political purpose — to respond to the anger building across the country as big banks, having been rescued by the taxpayers, report record profits and begin paying out huge bonuses while millions of Americans remain out of work.”
From Politico.com (which broke the story): “A fee on banks would help solve two political problems for the White House. First, the administration would benefit politically from tapping into the populist anger about enormous 2009 banker bonuses that will be announced in coming days. And second, it would help stem some of that backlash from the GOP about runaway federal deficits.”
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