ST ANDREWS, Scotland (Reuters) - Proposals for a tax on financial transactions to fund the cost of future bank bailouts are unattractive, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said on Saturday.
British finance minister Alistair Darling said at a G20 meeting of developed and emerging economies that the UK would back such a plan if it received broad international support, but Flaherty and U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner were skeptical.
"It's one of the ideas that's on the table, but is not particularly attractive to me as finance minister of Canada. We have been a government that has been reducing taxes," Flaherty told a news conference after the summit in St Andrews, Scotland.
Better to simply make sure that banks aren't knowingly giving loans to those who cannot or probably cannot repay them.
The Left in America didn't do that. In fact, they forced the banks to give loans to so many folks who couldn't repay them, that they caused the recession! And they don't appear to have learned their lesson at all, either.
Canada, even under the Liberals (uncharacteristically), didn't do what the American Left did. This is why we didn't have to bail out our banks.
So it's silly to impose a transaction tax to fund future bailouts. If problems such as the Left caused in America are going to be carefully prevented from happening, then there'll be no need for bailouts, and no need for a special tax to finance them.
There's a lot of lamebrained socialist ideas being proposed and implemented, particularly by the Obamacrat Regime. Then there's the "United Nations", which is coming up with the most ludicrous ideas we've ever heard.
Best to keep everything Canadian, and be wary of international-socialist nonsense proposals.
Canada can continue to lead the world by setting a common-sense example.
