If you want to know what’s wrong with the Obama administration’s approach to the financial markets, I herewith submit Exhibit A: the financial-transactions tax, an idea that absolutely, positively, definitely is not happening.

Yes, I know, there are rumblings out of Congress that the idea is still alive. I also know that you can’t open up the financial pages without somebody saying what a simply great/horrific/progressive/idiotic idea it is. It has the seal of approval from not one but two New York Times op-ed columnists, Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman, while the Wall Street Journal editorial page attacked the idea from almost the moment it was advanced by Gordon Brown at the G-20 meeting in Scotland. The Journal also thought it was Exhibit A “in the department of bad ideas that won't go away.”

The Journal editorialists are right that this is not a new idea. In fact, it is so old as to be a bit banal by now. It was first proposed in 1972 by a Yale economist named James Tobin after President Nixon withdrew from the Bretton Woods accords. The principle is simple: Every time a stock or bond is sold, a tiny fee, at the most just one quarter of 1 percent, is imposed on the transaction. Such a fee obviously doesn’t mean much to the vast majority of shareholders, who rarely do any trading, but would be a source of gazillions of bucks if imposed on every single stock, bond, and, above all, derivatives trade.

The aim would be to curb financial speculation—“socially useless” activities, as one British minister put it—while at the same time enriching the coffers of the Treasury by perhaps $100 billion a year, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which is pushing the idea. Opponents say that traders would figure out some way around the tax, little devils that they are, and besides, it would encourage spending. Horrors! “Even if every country that matters in global finance would agree, the tax money would be spent as fast as it came in on whatever those governments chose to spend it on,” sniffed the Journal in its editorial.

Nice as it is that this is being debated, it would seem that all of the yammering is an exercise in futility. To work, the idea would have to be imposed globally, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has made it clear that he’s against it. ("That's not something we're prepared to support," said he.) That makes the idea of a transactions tax a great deal more remote than it would be even if it the securities industry and hedge fund types (with the notable exception of George Soros) weren’t dead set against it.

Now, think about it for a moment. Can you envision any significant change in the way the securities industry is being regulated that the securities industry has opposed that the Obama administration has adopted? I can’t. And that brings me back to why this is Exhibit A in the Obama Administration’s failure to oversee Wall Street. Like its predecessors, the Obama Administration thinks too much like the people it is regulating.