Unstoppable by Ralph Nader Page B

economists, and many environmentalists. And tax financial speculation; hike gambling taxes and taxes on addictive products like tobacco, alcohol, and certain addictive drugs; raise the penalties oncorporate crime along with other harmful activity; and do all that before going for worker incomes.
    Conservative Nobel laureate in economics Gary S. Becker, former secretary of the treasury George P. Shultz, and former chief economic adviser to President George W. Bush, N. Gregory Mankiw, are leading proponents of a carbon tax or a gasoline tax to pay for the damage (called “externalities” by economists) of motor vehicle traffic. Canadian reformers have a saying for this: “Tax what we burn, not what we earn.” I would add: “Tax first what we bet, not what we net.” When I discuss these ideas before mixed audiences, I find much convergent interest in those kinds of tax priorities, although some want the carbon tax to be revenue-neutral. But we won’t really know if these out-of-the-box proposals have traction unless some politicians and a few corporate leaders like Warren Buffett lead the way in giving the ideas visibility and credibility and then help the people mobilize.
    As to the chronic matter of owed but uncollected taxes, where the miscreants are flouting the law, signing on should be an easy decision for conservatives. Such flouting is unfair to those who pay taxes and have to pay more or receive fewer services. It amounts, says the IRS, to more than $300 billion a year in tax evasion! This is not tax avoidance, the type practiced by corporate interests that legally use tax havens and have many other arcane ways they have pushed through Congress to escape taxes; it is a violation of the law. Amazingly, many conservatives and libertarians I have spoken with over time view this as a sport, as if cheating is making up for the too many taxes people have to pay. Because of this attitude, this issue may have to be shelved for a more auspicious time of convergent resolution.
    6. Break up the “too big to fail” banks.
    Conservative columnist George Will put the judgment pithily: a financial institution that is “too big to fail is too big to exist.” 11 Richard W. Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, delivered a detailed address in January 2013 on just how to disaggregate these banks in a top-to-bottom restructuring, so that no one giant bank can imperil the financial system and require another gigantic taxpayer bailout. Out of more than 5,600 US commercial banks, Fisher says, “half of the entire banking industry’s assets are in the hands of five institutions”—JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and US Bancorp. “This incurs the wrath of ordinary citizens,” Fisher adds, “and smaller entities that resent this ‘favorable treatment.’ . . . [Through encouraging these big banks] we plant the seeds of social unrest.” Perversely, the big bank bailouts under Bush and Obama required immediate mergers and acquisitions that more than doubled this concentration of banking assets and deposits.
    Too-big-to-fail (TBTF) guarantees profits because it socializes losses. Mr. Will expresses why this subject is an immediate subject for ideological and legislative convergence: “TBTF is a double moral disaster. It creates moral hazard by encouraging risky behavior and it delegitimizes capitalism by validating public cynicism about its risk-reward ratios.” 12 Most members of Congress, liberal and conservative, agree that TBTF must end, but as Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) said, “The banks . . . frankly, own the place.” 13
    Perhaps what he should have said was that “the banks bought this place.” If the votes are there, with the smaller banks, consumers, and taxpayers at their back, members of Congress can un-buy themselves, at least for the limited purpose of prohibiting TBTF and letting