Ok so as a slightly young, naïve and idealistic lefty, The Robin Hood Tax sounds to me like a brilliant solution. Take money from people who have too much of it and spend it wisely to help people who don’t. As Aleksander the Meerkat would say; simples.

But a little part of me, perhaps the part that is getting old, wise and rational, believes it must be more complicated than that. Surely?! Otherwise the only controversial issue in my opinion is; why haven’t we been doing this for years?

The general gist of the Robin Hood idea, or Financial Transaction Tax, is to tax the banks at an average rate of 0.05% and use the money to fill public sector deficits at home, and fight poverty and climate change globally. The team at Robin Hood Tax HQ believe this is the obvious way for the banks to turn the financial crisis into an opportunity to prove their social worth and claim it could raise $400 billion a year. With the World Bank estimating that to meet the Millennium Development goals we’d need an extra $60 billion dollars a year, this seems like an ideal way to make up the extra.

Not everybody is so easily convinced. It appeared that companies were voting in their thousands against the tax, until it was discovered that the votes were coming from just two computers, one of which was at Goldman Sachs, the global investment bank. Others have also raised concerns. Ed West of The Telegraph questions the use of the legend of Robin Hood, who apparently was pretty anti-taxation and according to West, would not have been happy about his name being used for such a campaign.

Perhaps I’m missing the point here, but if Robin Hood is in fact a legend rather than a real living person, should we be bothered? The first thing that springs to mind when people say Robin Hood (well perhaps second, after a spectacular performance from Kevin Costner) is that he took from the rich to give to the poor. I doubt arguing over the history of a fictional character was really the debate the campaign was hoping to generate, and would rather have heard from West a better explanation of why he thinks the tax is the ‘stupidest idea’ since 1984.

There is some debate about the numbers, and whether the whole idea is based on confusion over the difference between profit and turnover. Tim Worstall points out that $400 billion would be almost half of the profit made by the banking sector in 2006, and that we can’t expect for those losses not to be passed on to consumers one way or another.

However, the IMF has published a report explaining how the tax could work, including what would be taxed and how much it would raise. The debate is clearly open and ready for contributors on both sides.

There are claims that the only people who support the idea are young, naïve and idealistic, (or slightly less politely from Tim Worstall, f***ing mad) and anyone with any sense or economic understanding thinks it’s a ridiculous idea. Joseph Stiglitz is 67 and a Nobel Prize Winning Economist and he believes the tax would bring benefits.

Maybe this does make me naïve but if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.