Nurses to Take Tax Push to Congressional Districts

More than 10,000 nurses from coast to coast are planning to attend demonstrations Thursday at the district offices of members of Congress in 21 states, urging them to support a tax on financial transactions.

The nurses, members of National Nurses United, want Congress to impose a 0.5% levy on financial transactions involving stocks, bonds, currency trading and derivatives. The nurses say the tax is already in place in more than 40 countries, and could raise up to $350 billion a year in the U.S. to rebuild the infrastructure.

"Congress is willing to bail out Wall Street because they get political contributions but they aren't willing to take care of Main Street. We are taking care of Main Street every single day so we felt it was our job to step up," NNU Co-president Deborah Burger, RN, told HealthLeaders Media.

"Nurses are doing this because they are sick and tired of seeing patients coming into the hospitals and community clinics who can't afford healthcare, who have lost their home and jobs, and who can't afford the drugs to take care of themselves and their families," Burger says.

"If they're asking everybody for shared sacrifice it is time for Wall Street to step up to the plate. We aren't asking for a lot. We are asking for a tiny transaction tax to rebuild Main Street."

In addition to the district rallies, the nurses are holding other events such as soup kitchens for the hungry, community forums, and street theater skits in Boston – where a town crier in will read a litany of complaints against Wall Street malfeasance – and in Chicago, San Francisco, and Orlando, and smaller cities, such as Corpus Christi, TX, Marquette, MI, and Dayton, OH.

While unions generally rely on a more sympathetic reception from Democrats, Burger says NNU will press both parties to support the transaction tax because NNU does not believe it is a partisan issue. "We are pressuring Republicans and Democrats. We are not out there fronting for the Democratic Party," she says. "We are holding both sides accountable because both sides have been pandering to Wall Street and have bailed them out with trillions of dollars." 

"We want to make sure that everybody understands that you aren't off the hook just because you're a Democrat or a Republican. We are targeting the entire system, because the entire system is morally bankrupt."

Burger says NNU will release data contrasting contributions Democratic and Republican lawmakers have received from Wall Street even as the lawmakers' districts suffer from economic woes.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), for example, allegedly has accepted $2,417,672 in campaign contributions from Wall Street financial institutions over the past 12 years. In the meantime, NNU says 69,241 people in Ryan's district are uninsured, 22,884 use food stamps, and 20,394 children and 7,939 seniors live in poverty.

Sen. Michael Bennett (D-CO) allegedly has collected $2,409,806 campaign contributions from Wall Street while Colorado is among the top 10 states for home foreclosures, has 184,689 children in poverty, 116,941 people using food stamps, and 13,390 homeless, NNU says.

Burger says NNU is not supporting a specific bill right now. "What we know is that legislation always gets watered down. We aren't endorsing a particular piece of legislation until we are assured that it will raise more money than what I would consider 'couch change,'" she says. "Right now there are some lukewarm financial tax proposals out there, but they would only raise $1 billion or so and that is not sufficient to make a credible different in rebuilding the infrastructure."

Burger says the NNU does not want the tax applied to transactions such as home mortgages, loans, initial public offerings, publicly traded short-term debt, or mutual fund or 401(k) accounts. "Basically it is geared toward the in-and-out, speculative transactions," she says.

The estimated $350 billion in revenues that a financial transactions tax would raise was taken from a study done by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Robert Pollin, an economist at PERI and an author of the study, says the $350 billion estimate -- while possible -- probably is overly optimistic. "I myself would not argue that you are going to raise $350 billion at this rate because we have to assume some reduction in trading volume," Pollin says. "Nobody really knows how much trading volume would go down with such a tax. In my opinion probably a better estimate would be in the range of $200 billion."

NNU cites estimates that the $2.4 trillion in government bailouts to financial and other institutions already spent would have funded 63 million jobs at the national median level of about $39,000 a year.  

Union organizers say the 61 members of Congress were targeted for the demonstrations both because of their high-profile on Capitol Hill, and because they lived in districts with high numbers of NNU members.

Burger says NNU elected to stage multiple rallies at legislators' home offices because they would be harder to ignore than a mass rally in Washington, DC. "Groups rally at the Capitol all the time and the get brushed under the rug and Congress is off the hook. But back in their communities, that is where they take notice," she says. "That's where their voters are."