Security is not luxury. The more valuable stuff you have the bigger and better safe box you want to buy. Security spending is more like insurance policy. You can buy cheaper insurance but it will have less coverage and carry more risk for you. Needless to say, poor people might skip security spending all together.
Your security needs to be better than others. The argument you are presenting is the one sold by defense companies. If the criminals are running around with handguns then there's no point building a thick titanium walled fortress on a mountain for security. Plus the fact that you think reducing the budget by 2-3% is "scrimping".
Well, you might try to reduce "security budget" for your home, or your car, or your valuables by 2-3%. If you think it will work for you, so be it. Everyone has their own risk tolerance. People who don't own any of this might skip security spending all together.
Completely irrelevant. You start with the assumption that current security spending if 100% efficient, obviously it is not. Politicians simply choose to go after trading as it's a much easier target than LMT/NOC/BA lobby. Assuming the banks will lobby against this, it becomes a fairer battle but if they get an exemption, we are doomed. It's also so easy to sell to the average Joe. "Do you want to leave America defenseless?" vs "Do you care about rich bankers?". Idiots react with emotion and the choice is obvious.
Defending a living organism is evolutionary necessity. Talk to your doctor about your own body defenses, a gift to you from Mother Nature and millions of years of evolution. The nation is no different. And a wealthy & sucessful nation has a need for defending & protecting itself more than anybody else. I guess the only people who have a hard time internalizing this simple concept are the people who have nothing to lose on a personal level. Or the hypocrites like Bernie.
Bernie released some deets, get ready for elite traders to become derivative traders: https://berniesanders.com/en/issues/free-college-cancel-debt/ Tax Wall Street Gambling to Cancel All Student Debt and Pay for College for All We can guarantee higher education as a right for all and cancel all student debt for an estimated $2.2 trillion. To pay for this, we will impose a tax of a fraction of a percent on Wall Street speculators who nearly destroyed the economy a decade ago. This Wall Street speculation tax will raise $2.4 trillion over the next ten years. It works by placing a 0.5 percent tax on stock trades – 50 cents on every $100 of stock – a 0.1 percent fee on bond trades, and a 0.005 percent fee on derivative trades. If Wall Street can be bailed out for several trillion dollars, 45 million Americans can and will be bailed out of the $1.6 trillion burden of student loan debt and we can provide free college for all. Some 40 countries throughout the world have imposed a similar tax, including Britain, South Korea, Hong Kong, Brazil, Germany, France, Switzerland and China.
He says it will raise $2.4 trillion over ten years. I wonder if that is based on current market volume. Volume will dry up if the tax is instituted. Also, many smaller brokers may go out of business, and larger brokers will likely lose a good bit of business. All of that will negatively effect the projected revenue stream.