“I think it is very unlikely that you would see this kind of tax on bonuses here in the U.S.,” Douglas J. Elliott at the Brookings Institution in Washington said. But, he added, “There are going to be big bonuses this season. There will be high levels of public anger. Therefore there will be some bills introduced. I just don’t think they are going to make it through.”

In a speech to Parliament on Wednesday, Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the Exchequer, effectively conceded that the tax on bank bonuses was mostly a political symbol: The levy, he said, would raise only £550 million  an amount that would hardly make up for a yawning budget deficit, let alone the roughly £1 trillion the government has extended to shore up Lloyds Banking Group, Royal Bank of Scotland and other British banks that stumbled in the crisis.

A more severe version of the British tax was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in March, after an uproar over $165 million in bonuses paid to A.I.G. employees after the company received a huge government bailout. But the proposal, which called for a 90 percent retroactive tax on awards of $250,000 and above, was seen as too punitive and never made it to the Senate floor.

Since then, President Obama and federal policy makers have taken a more measured approach to taxing banker bonuses, after considering the effect on the government’s wider efforts to nurse the banking industry back to health and to maintain a flow of credit to consumers and small businesses.

An official briefed on the administration’s reviews of Wall Street compensation said the government made a similar effort 20 years ago to tax bonuses  without success. “They simply got around the law by giving all sorts of perks and deferred compensation,” the official said. “It became unworkable and had unintended consequences.”