If the current tax is used to motivate certain action how will this be addressed? Ie mort deduction, energy tax credits, etc. What is to prevent state and local gov't from doing the same?
Just thinking aloud here and I may be well wrong but assume a 1% trading tax is levied on all US products. Couldn't somewhere like Dubai set up a massive swap exchange so if you buy IBM there you don't actually buy IBM shares but you still get the P&L should the price move. The price for IBM in Dubai is the same as NY's price. Dubai therefore overnight becomes as big as London or NY.
Much deeper than that. All wholesale transactions are also taxed 1%. Every time a dollar trades hands it gets devalued by 1%. Add 7% - 10% Sales Tax to the equation you get something scarier than compounding interest. You get a government issued currency that clones itself every 10 - 15 transactions. No need to print more money it does it all by itself. If our GDP is $14,260,000,000,000 this transactional tax would be an astounding: $142,600,000,000, sales and additional fluff taxes would be $1,426,000,000,000 but the real kicker will be all of the B2B wholesale transactions that currently do not get taxed... at least 10x more. Every raw material, every exchange of dollar value. In the Health Care reform bill all payments made to a party > $600 per year are required to be reported electronically to the IRS. This will make foreign labor, materials and products much more attractive to US consumers. Kiss the dollar as the reserve currency of the world good bye. People are resourceful and there will be a plethora of black market barter exchanges popping up... Back to the Gold standard.
ROFLMAO - fu(k the moving of chairs on the deck of the Titanic!!!!! The debt is NOT made by a lack of taxation!!!! The debt is caused by spending more than you earn and the MONETARY system that we have!!!!! REALIZE THIS - as long as we have a "Federal" Reserve that "lends" to the gov't at interest - as long as we have a Federal Reserve - there is NO END to US DEBT!!!! The gov't is THE PEOPLE - the "Federal" Reserve is PRIVATE!!!!!
the hardest hit would be HFTs, which arguably provide little to no benefit to the market anyway. (their liquidity dries up in milliseconds when their conditions aren't met so they are useless as MMs.)