Why is it Called "Common" Sense When It's Rare?

By John Ballard

Poverty Is Through the Roof, and Billionaires Are Getting Pissy About Not Enough Profits.
That great title says it all.

Thus far we don't seem able to ameliorate the problem, but outlining the dimensions may be a step forward. This delightful summary by Les Leopold is concise and clear.

Why are Wall Street's billionaires so whiny? Is it really possible to make $900,000 an hour (not a typo -- that's what the top ten hedge fund managers take in), and still feel aggrieved about the way government is treating you? After you've been bailed out by the federal government to the tune of $10 trillion (also not a typo) in loans, asset swaps, liquidity and other guarantees, can you really still feel like an oppressed minority?

Go the the link for loads of common sense observations.
He ends with a reminder of how similar problems were handled in Ike's day.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was no radical, but he accepted the reality: If America was going to prosper -- and pay for its costly Cold War -- the super-rich would have to pony up. It was common knowledge that when the rich grew too wealthy, they used their excess incomes to speculate. In the 1950s, memories of the Great Depression loomed large, and people knew that a skewed distribution of income only fueled speculative booms and disastrous busts. On Ike's watch, the effective marginal tax rate for those earning over $3 million (in today's dollars) was over 70 percent. The super-rich paid. As a nation we respected that other important American value: advancing the common good.

For the last thirty years we've been told that making as much as you can is just another way of advancing the common good. But the Great Recession erased that equation: The Wall Streeters who made as much as they could undermined the common good. It's time to balance the scales. This isn't just redistribution of income in pursuit of some egalitarian utopia. It's a way to use public policy to reattach billionaires to the common good.

It's time to take Eisenhower's cue and redeploy the excessive wealth Wall Street's high rollers have accumulated. If we leave it in their hands, they'll keep using it to construct speculative financial casinos. Instead, we could use that money to build a stronger, more prosperous nation. We could provide our people with free higher education at all our public colleges and universities -- just like we did for WWII vets under the GI Bill of Rights (a program that returned seven dollars in GDP for every dollar invested). We could fund a green energy Manhattan Project to wean us from fossil fuels. An added bonus: If we siphon some of the money off Wall Street, some of our brightest college graduates might even be attracted not to high finance but to jobs in science, education and healthcare, where we need them.

Anyone using the word common is a target for those who would accuse them of being socialist. The phrase "redistribution of wealth" is among the many barbs lobbed by the scare-mongers at efforts which are in fact a redistribution of responsibility.

The more I think about it the better I like the idea of a per-transaction micro-tax which will curb high-volume speculation while raising tons of revenue at the same time.
An accounting term referring to tiny charges aimed at covering just the basic costs of a transaction is called a haircut. Check these links for a more exact definition.
The time has come for the US Treasury to start collecting a haircut as well.