(Albany, NY) The Hunger Action Network of NYS today renewed its call to use the anti-speculation tax on stock transfers to help resolve the state budget deficit rather than continuing to rebate more than $9 billion annually to Wall Street traders.

“The greed of Wall Street speculators is behind the recent economic crisis, including the housing crisis and the massive decline in retirement funds.
Yet those who have caused the current economic crisis were the ones that benefited from the trillions in bailouts from Congress. New York lawmakers should not repeat this outrage. Instead of cutting funding from essential services, the Governor and state leaders need to hold Wall Street financiers accountable for the damage they have inflicted upon New York residents and the State Budget,” stated Mark Dunlea, Executive Director of the Hunger Action Network of New York State.

New York State presently collects a very small tax on each stock transfer.
The tax is negligible for individuals who are making a long term investment in the Stock Market and the economy. It primarily impacts those who buy and sell stocks frequently, such as those who utilize computer trading programs that have greatly contributed to the increasingly common wild swings in stock market prices. However, New York rebates the tax to Wall Street traders after it is collected.

Hunger Action Network also said that the State needs to go further in raising taxes on the wealthy in order to counteract the growing income inequality in the state. For several years, New York State has had the greatest gap in income not only between rich and poor New Yorkers but also between the rich and moderate income New Yorkers. The average income of the top fifth of New York families is 8.7 times greater than that of the bottom fifth. The average income of the top five percent of New York families is 15.4 times greater than that of the bottom 20 percent. Both are the biggest difference of all states.

Hunger Action called upon the State Attorney General and state regulators to be far more aggressive in ferreting out fraud in the banking, financial and housing lending industry in the state.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that major US banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year—a record high. Yet the U.S. foreclosure filings climbed to a record high in the third quarter. Nearly 940,000 homes received a default notice or were repossessed by banks – that’s a 23 percent increase from a year earlier.

William Black is a former bank regulator at the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation who helped expose the savings and loan scandal in the 1980s. In his new book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. Prof.
Black documents that while many banks are reporting sizeable profits in order to trigger the payment of large bonuses to top executives; in reality many of the banks are insolvent. In collusion with government regulators and the accounting industry, they are being allowed to hide significant losses in real estate (e.g., mortgages in default) in order to fraudulently claim profits and extract bonuses.

“Those who caused are economic crisis are the only ones who are benefiting from it. They use their campaign contributions to pay state and federal lawmakers to allow them to loot the rest of America – and to bail them out whenever their house of cards collapse. We need Governor Paterson and state lawmakers to stop this collusion. The cause of our state budget crisis is not excessive state spending. It is corruption of the financial and political systems, and that is what lawmakers should address, starting with campaign finance reform,” added Dunlea.