I think it's a good idea. But only if it completely replaces all federal taxes. Then anyone who uses a US bank or financial institute will pay the tax and those who don't, who operate cash only because they're poor, don't.
Read and learn about honest taxation: http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/George/grgPFT25.html#Chapter%2025
I'd support transaction taxes on larger volume stock purchases/sells to add revenue, indirectly redistribute some wealth, and to take some (as in a lot) of the insane volatility out of the markets, and maybe some value added-taxes on high-end items, or targeted excise taxes on the exportation of raw materials, but that would be as about as far as I would go in that direction.
I read somewhere that on average, every year, four quadrillion dollars is exchanged on Wall Street alone. That's $4,000,000,000,000,000 Ahem That's $4,000,000,000,000,000 that's not taxed a penny.... I'd support taxing every trade at a rate of one tenth of one percent of the value of each share that changes hands. First and foremost, that would be used to pay off the debt, and then after the national debt is paid off, any extra monies would be used to improve the United States' infrastructure, since the nation's infrastructure is crumbling.
Tax that trade, and watch it disappear. Why not pay for infrastructure by recovering some of the land value it creates, instead of giving it all away to landowners in return for nothing?
Every time a new tax is proposed, someone comes along and says that the item to be taxed will be eliminated. I don't see any way Corporate America will survive without the stock market. They're so dependent on it that it's a safe thing to tax.
I heard the derivatives bubble was $600 trillion not $4 quadrillion. I support a 0.1% tax on derivatives which would raise $600 billion to $4 trillion in annual revenue. If the USG can be financed under this plan and begin to pay down the debt, then I would support abolishing income taxes. Otherwise I support a flax tax on all income earned by individuals and corporations beyond the first $20,000; a goods and services tax to replace the payroll tax with $3000 in annual rebates for every man, woman and child legally residing in the USA; repeal of the alternative minimum tax; targeted waivers for the capital gains tax; increasing alcohol and tobacco taxes; and increasing tariffs on foreign oil.
I could support something like this if there were a baseline exemption sufficient to protect retired investors. For example, a 90-year old retiree with 100k in equities and an occasional need for a "hedge" can end up with a multi-million dollar basis if she trades frequently. It would be counterproductive to penalize her, wouldn't it? So, how about it we exempted the first.... say.... 100 million (annually) from the tax? This way, small and small-to-medium investors don't get dinged, while we still collect the revenue from the large and medium-to-large investors and all of the "frequent traders" (read: speculators). Simply make the capital gains rate equal the ordinary income rate. Problem solved.
There's only about 70 Trillion in wealth around the world, so you have to know most of that is hot air.
The derivatives market is many times larger than the sum total of all the wealth in the world. The (paper) gold market alone is about 600 times as big as the total amount of gold on the planet (mined and unmined). That's kinda why we've been having problems. (We've been trying to tell you)...
And it's because of cheap credit made possible by 1% interest rates that Federal Reserve artificially keeps there (same for Japan). (As We've been trying to tell you.) People wouldn't make such investments, if they had to weigh-in their own money.
Here is what I would do, I would replace the current tax code with the flat tax on individuals and corporations, goods and services tax, a land value tax, increased taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and a 0.1% tax on derivatives. The "D-Tax" as we will call it will be earmarked to pay the interest and the principle on the national debt until the debt is retired. If it raises all the money advocates claim, we would retire the entire national debt in short order saving the USG $400 billion a year in interest on the national debt, reduce interest rates nationwide, and boost economic growth, After we retire the national debt, we will nationalize all current consumer and business debt and pay that off too, making America debt free. Further boosting economic growth because people will have money to save and invest as well as spend and not paying trillions of dollars to the big banks,
Hogwash. The ad valorem sales tax sucks the poor dry while not even much bothering the investor class, who have most of the money to begin with. I would go with a flat rate per share traded on all financial instruments. Derivatives should probably be illegal to start with. They do not really get any product made. Capital gains tax should be set at the percentage of the economy represented by the financial sector, after the first $200K. That protects retirees. The financial sector can start investing in physical plant and production of goods at home or be bled dry so that somebody else can. Income taxes should be based on the poverty level income and the percentage of persons living below that level, and graduated by some function of the percentage of a poverty-level income the income re4presents. When times are good for the lower classes, the wealthy pay less. If we go into a depression, they pay more. That would teach them not to down-size to earn a more obscene profit.
We can't do that, because it would mean that we might punish somebody and they'd have to live with ONLY hundreds of million$ instead of billion$! Wouldn't you feel bad to disadvantage those people?
The USG did levy a securities transaction excise tax to finance the Spanish American War but repealed the tax after hostilities ended.
That's not new wealth, that's just the amount of money that changes hands in one year on Wall Street. I'd feel about as bad as I do when I swat a mosquito.....now that I think of it, there's no difference between most billionaire tycoons and a mosquito, they're both blood-sucking parasites that serve no purpose
It's not hard to understand the effect of elasticity on volume at a given level of taxation. The stock market is not the same as high-volume financial tansactions in items like foreign exchange and derivatives. A transaction tax won't end the stock market. It will just end the massive trading volumes in commodity and financial derivatives markets, almost none of which is accounted for by stock trades.
Right. So old people would have to move out of their homes because their taxes go up after they quit working. Freaking brilliant.
Did you know that the plan that Roy L advocates allows every citizen to hold some land (like a modest residential lot) completely tax free? The land value tax is a plan to share the earth and its resources, every citizen would become a landholder as a basic human right. The only people who would pay the land value tax are those who want more land (by value) than their fair share. The money collected from those who want to use higher valued land than their fair share, would be used to fund the government. So your accusation would only apply to those retired individuals who wish to occupy extra ordinary amounts of valuable land. Occupying more land than your fair share is a privilege, and privileges should be paid for. Not charging people a tax for the government-issued privileges they hold is the primary cause of wealth inequality.
<sigh> "But when we seek to rectify this system, to break down this unnatural and vicious circle, to interrupt this sequence of unsatisfactory reactions, what happens? We are not confronted with any great argument on behalf of the owner. Something else is put forward, and it is always put forward in these cases to shield the actual landowner or the actual capitalist from the logic of the argument or from the force of a Parliamentary movement. Sometimes it is the widow. But that personality has been used to exhaustion. It would be sweating in the cruellest sense of the word, overtime of the grossest description, to bring the widow out again so soon. She must have a rest for a bit..." -- Winston Churchill The holocaust you so predictably and stupidly shriek in consternation over -- "Noooo! Someone might decide to seek accomodation better suited to their needs and means! Oh, the humanity!" -- might indeed happen in a handful of cases where retirees were unable to repay unexpectedly great increases in the location subsidies government and the community were giving them. There might indeed be a few cases where retirees decided that they couldn't justify depriving everyone else of such valuable publicly provided opportunities, even given their individual exemptions, public assistance in taking advantage of ways to use their locations more productively, and, in extremis, compassionate deferrals. It's possible. I'm not saying it could never happen -- though not a single case of it has ever been documented. The point is, your "argument" is the same "argument" the evil, filthy Proposition 13 liars used in California. And what actually happens when people foolishly listen to such "arguments"? What is the actual result of your slobbering over retirees who decide to help the community by moving to more suitable locations? To save a few dozen wealthy California retirees the inconvenience of selling their houses for huge, unearned, and untaxed capital gains and moving to more suitable accommodation, California's property tax rates were slashed by half, and then relentlessly reduced even more, producing a massive housing bubble and collapse that resulted in not just a few people selling in one neighborhood to buy in another, but MILLIONS of people being thrown out their homes and losing not only their homes but their entire life savings and any hope of relief from financial duress, MILLIONS of people being forced into permanent poverty by unaffordable rents and mortgage interest, and thousands of them DYING of that poverty. Why is it that you consider only the financial convenience of rich, privileged landowners to be important, and not the rights, the suffering, or even the lives of the landless? Why do only landowners have any claim to your concern or compassion, while the landless, by contrast, you cheerfully continue to slaughter to provide fertilizer for landowners' flower gardens? Your way of murdering the poor who DON'T own land, you mean? Yes, it is brilliant. In fact, it's absolutely diabolical in its subtlety, its deviousness, and its plausible deniability. You can even deny it to yourself. But what about what happens now, "lefty," hmmmm? You profess to care about the poor and working people -- and now retirees. But in point of fact, you do not care about the VASTLY GREATER NUMBERS of non-landowning poor, working people, and retirees who are forced to move out of their homes NOW because they can't afford to pay rising rents to PRIVATE landowners. You do not care about the thousands of NON-landowning poor, including retirees, who DIE EVERY YEAR in the USA because of the poverty, unemployment and injustice the subsidy to landowning causes. You do not care about the millions of honest working people and consumers who not only have never been able to afford a home, but are forced into permanent poverty because they are made to pay for government TWICE so that landowners can pocket one of the payments in return for nothing. How many of the landless do you demand be MURDERED EVERY YEAR to provide an exorbitant enough welfare subsidy giveaway to greedy, privileged, parasitic scum that no retired landowner ever decides to be less extravagantly wasteful in his occupancy of good land? Excessive exposure to such evil makes me physically ill. Sorry, I can no longer continue this today.
