Robin Hood Tax Activists to Address Economic Injustice

Dressed as Robin Hood, protestors rallied Tuesday at JPMorgan Chase bank in New York for a tax on bank transactions that aims to take from the rich and give to the poor.

The roughly 30 protestors -- representing some 10 organizations -- proposed a Robin Hood tax, designed to address the economic injustices of the 2008 crisis.

Their initiative would impose a tax of .005-.5% on financial transactions, which supporters say could raise anywhere between $175 and 350 billion a year in the United States for health, education and employment.

"They have to return what we lend them. We aren't talking about a little park, or cleaning a building. We are talking about money for health, employment and education," protestor Sami Aldi, age 60, told Agence France Presse. Aldi represented 170,000 members of the National Nurses United, a union for health care professionals.

Aldi explained that he's seeing "a lack of nurses for the first time in his life," while hundreds of billions are being spent on bailing out big banks.

The idea of a Robin Hood Tax was first conceived in 1972 by Nobel Prize winner James Tobin, which proposed a currency transaction tax as a means of addressing the volatility of international exchange rates.

The organizers of today's rally claim that economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs as well as business moguls like Bill Gates and George Soros favor the initiative.

Similar legislation has been proposed in nine member nations of the European Union, including France, Germany and Spain.