Major Research Findings: Sanders’ Tax Wall Street Plan Would Raise $300 Billion And --

--Create Millions of New Jobs

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/22/major-research-findings-sanders-tax-wall-street-plan-would-raise-300-billion-and

But a new report from the University of Massachusetts Amherst Political Economy Research Institute documents how a key Sanders proposal — a tax on Wall Street speculation -would bring at least $300 billion a year in new revenues from those who can most afford to pay it for the critical reforms the country so desperately needs.

Further, the report by Robert Pollin, lead author, and his colleagues James Heintz and Thomas Herndon, breaks new ground in documenting that the tax would be a huge boon to the economy in creating millions of new jobs in education beyond what the same spending creates on Wall Street.

And contrary to the critics would not dampen productive investment, which has fallen sharply under the reckless Wall Street behavior of recent decades.

Taxing Wall Street speculation to finance free public college tuition, as Sanders talks about on the campaign trail, and has introduced in legislation, S 1373, the College for All Act, could create a net expansion of 4.2 million jobs. Not to mention securing equal educational opportunity for everyone, regardless of background or ability to pay.

Investing in education produces more than 8 times the number of jobs created by the same spending in financial services, the authors explain.

This finding parallels a 2009 National Nurses United study that found conversion to a Medicare for all health care system, as Sanders also proposes, would create millions of new, good paying jobs, as would a green economy as Pollin documented in his 2012 book “Back to Full Employment.”

Simply put, a socially productive economy, from education to healthcare to renewable energy is also a job creation engine.As with the extremism insinuation, the unelectability charge lacks foundation. Polls show Sanders beating all the potential Republican nominees, and beating Trump handily.