This is the Tom Hartman Program.

And welcome back.

Tom Hartman here with you on the line with us.

This is Professor Richard Wolf, the Economist,

co-founder of Democracy at Work. Info, author of numerous books his most recent

understanding socialism and R.D.Wulf with 2F's.com also one of his websites.

You can tweet him at Prof Wolf as in Professor

Wolf. Oxfam America has just come out and called for a tax on pandemic

profiteers. There's a whole bunch of corporations that are making more money than before.

Kind of shades of, was it, Nixon or Carter, who had the windfall profits tax on oil producers

fact during the Arab oil embargo?

Yeah, this is an old idea.

It's gone by the name of windfall profits, excess profits,

a variety of terms.

We've done that in the United States, World War I and two and two and so forth so there's precedent

for it the basic idea is simple

if the nation faces a catastrophic emergency like a war let alone a world war or you might say like a pandemic

happening together with an economic crash like we're going through now that that ought to be a good enough reason to say to

businesses we will not bother you about the profits you've been earning but

if during a time of national catastrophe where we need resources to deal with overcoming

the problem and the crisis, any extra profit you make should be taxed away and used by the government to fight the pandemic, to fight the

unemployment, to fight the war, whatever the crisis was

...