Thursday's Top 10 with NZ Mint: Slay the false god of disposability; Robin Hood Tax to go before Congress; Obama's chance to prove he's not Wall St's boy; Dilbert

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 4pm in association with NZ Mint.

I welcome your additions in the comments below or via email tobernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.

I'll pop the extras into the comment stream. See all previous Top 10s here.

The video at number 5 is my favourite today. And the two Kebab-flavoured cartoons referring to Greece, which is soooo shished...

1. Who said a Robin Hood Tax couldn't happen in America? - Bloomberg reports A couple of Democrats are actually going to table a Financial Transactions Tax on the floor of the US Congress in the next couple of days.

No one expects it will get any traction any time soon, but you never know.

Everyone assumed the Americans would never have a bar of it.

But maybe they're just as desperate for the money as anyone else.

And bankers aren't exactly flavour of the month anymore.

This subject will be a key one at the G20 summit over the next couple of days. The Germans and French want it. The Brits don't, but only because the Americans don't...

Watch this space.

Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, and Representative Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat, will introduce the bills tomorrow in their respective chambers. The bills will give the United States an increased role in the international debate over a transaction tax, which is likely to be discussed at the Group of 20 summit this week in Cannes, France.

“It’s a significant way to raise some needed revenue,” Harkin said in an interview today in Washington. “Quite frankly, I bet nobody would even feel it.”

2. Enough of the disposable generation - Institutional Risk Analytics Dennis Santiago has a good old rant at Huffington Post about how America outsourced its manufacturing sector and adopted a 'build it cheap and throw it away' mentality.

He says this can be changed.

It's time to shift gears away from the false god of disposability. We should consider demanding changes in our engineering design and product-support strategy expectations. What I mean by this is to retrain our industries and designers to emphasize aspects of products that focus on making products more durable and maintainable. Or to put it another way, American-made quality again. The jargon that goes along with this are things like "fault tolerance," "doubled mean times between failure," "designed for maintainability" and other techno-babble.

But what it ultimately does is change the balance on the products we use so that instead of buying and trashing three of them every seven years, more of them will be bought once and maintained for five years. This restarts what used to be a healthy and viable repair-shop industry in this country that got blown away in the last couple of decades.

It's also a very green-conscious strategy, by the way. The highest carbon emission cost for a manufactured good is the initial production event, so deliberately redesigning a fraction of our consumer products inventory to two carbon hits per decade, down from three to five per decade, is worth taking a look at.

3. 'Go on Obama. You can do it' - Barack Obama could actually declare his independence from his Wall St backers (and the former Citigroup Exec who is now his chief of staff) by backing the Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) at this weekend's G20 meeting, Jeffrey Sachs points out.

Fat chance.

But here's Sachs anyway.  

If President Obama is true to his recent words sympathizing with Occupy Wall Street, he will join Sarkozy and Merkel in supporting the FTT. More likely, though, he will oppose the proposal in order to protect Wall Street, thereby continuing his pattern of progressive rhetoric that masks conservative policies.

There are three goals of the FTT proposal that will be considered at the G20 meeting. The first is to dampen high-speed automated trading and other short-term financial trades that contribute to excessive financial volatility. The second is to raise government revenues, especially in view of the fact that the financial sector is under-taxed in the G20 countries (including the US). The third is to harmonize such a tax across the G20 countries to avoid the obvious problem that a tax in one country but not others would push at least some transactions to other countries.

4. Protest against the bankers, not capitalism itself - John Kay captures something in this FT blog that bemoans the lack of focus and incoherence of Occupy Wall St, but acknowledges the underlying justice of what they are against and want.

Here's a snippet:

Greed is a human motivation, but not a dominant one – and the institutions that most exemplified the philosophy of greed were those that imploded in 2007-08. The goods made by workers whose motivation was purely instrumental were driven out of the marketplace by those of people who took pride in their work and of organisations which understood that complex assembly depends on teamwork. A semantic confusion leads us to use the word market to describe both the process which puts food on our table and the activity of gambling in credit default swaps. That confusion has enabled people to claim the virtues of the former for the latter.

Many of those who preach the doctrine of free enterprise loudest have succeeded by skills more akin to those of backroom politicians than of entrepreneurs. Mobile phone networks grew rapidly because a fortunate interlude of deregulatory fervour wrested a monopoly from incumbent fixed line operators. The inventors of social networking sites resemble the occupiers of St Paul’s Churchyard tents more than the occupants of boardrooms. The besuited Winkelvoss twins, lobbying and litigating for a share of Mark Zuckerberg’s business, embody the deformed view of market economics which confuses business interests with free enterprise.

5. 'Just break them up' - Societe Generale banking analyst Mike Mayo tells it like it is on the Too Big To Fail banks.

He wants them broken up. Fair enough.

"When I look at the current CEO compensation plan, I feel it is rigged," he said, citing "an abnormally low threshold to get the incentive pay."

"We've had butchered capitalism. This is not capitalism," he said. "Capitalism didn't fail. Not having capitalism is what caused the system to break down. Capitalism is having many eyes looking at the market acting on what they see, and being incented to act."

6. Maybe Thorium is the answer to the world's energy crisis- Russia Today has the story. HT Rod via email.

Solar, wind, and biomass have been touted as viable alternative energy sources to fossil fuels. But what if there is a nuclear energy source that is safe, green, and abundant? Thorium could be that source. ­ Lightbridge, based in Virginia, is now testing this next generation nuclear fuel in Russia.

“It dramatically reduces the amount of waste in the reactor, reduces the toxicity of the waste coming out of the reactor, and doesn't produce any weapons usable materials,” says Seth Grae, president and CEO of Lightbridge.  

7. More unequal means slower growth - Not the other way around. Mark Gimein at BusinessWeek does a nice job of skewering the idea that unequal countries are a natural consequence of strong economic growth and that trying to turn a country 'socialist' just slows growth.

Actually it might be the other way around if you look at the stats for Norway, America and Singapore. Norway and Singapore's growth rates have been stronger, even they they have become more equal.

Here's the two charts:

Is rising inequality the price of rapid economic growth? Advocates of deregulation often argue that the increasing concentration of wealth is driven by greater rewards going to innovators and entrepreneurs who drive the economy forward.

But is this kind of trade-off really a given? Not really. Above, you can see a chart of per capita income in the United States and two countries, Norway and Singapore, that have enjoyed a long period of sustained expansion.

8. Argentina tightens again - BBC reports Argentina, which has become the poster child for default and devaluation, has just cracked down on an apparent capital flight into US dollars again.

The Argentine government has imposed new restrictions on the purchase of US dollars, in an attempt to reduce capital flight and tax evasion.

People wanting to exchange Argentine pesos for dollars must now explain where they got the money, and show they have paid their taxes.

Currency trading in Buenos Aires on Monday was much reduced as a result. Many Argentines buy dollars to protect their wealth from inflation - thought to be higher than officially stated.

9. Totally Jon Stewart on the demonised 1%