this is off the e-mini_traders_anon Yahoo group, 12/22/09: "IMPORTANTlease sign and send our brand new petition "A financial-transaction tax is detrimental to many industries" at http://www.rallycongress.com/greentradertax-traders-association1 "We consolidated several points into this short and effective letter written by Robert A. Green We need your help in asking your trader friends and colleagues to sign and send one or both of our petitions to their Congressmen and President Obama to reach our goal of 25,000+ signers/senders. "Use the link above to access the following campaigns CURRENT GREENTRADERTAX TRADERS ASSOCIATION CAMPAIGNS "A financial-transaction tax is detrimental to many industries A financial-transaction tax will hurt markets, retail investors, farmers, jobs and America Ask your Congressmen and President Obama not to support this new type of tax CONTACT CONGRESS http://www.rallycongress.com/greent...action-tax-is-detrimental-to-many-industries/ "Save Traders' Jobs: Do Not Enact a Financial-Transaction Tax Traders, please join us by speaking-out to defend your job and business, saving it from the governmentâs tax axe. CONTACT CONGRESS http://www.rallycongress.com/greent...-jobs-do-not-enact-financial-transaction-tax/ " end . . . post to group via Judy MacKeigan
I can't believe they are doing this - right after my program started to bring me money! I guess, you never can win playing by the rules. Honesty never pays off. Oh well, in this case I'll have to switch to Asian trade centers or Forex. Or just rob govt same way govt robs us.
In his book The Battle for Investment Survival, Gerald Loeb stated it's not natural disasters which are the greatest hazards to men, but politicians.
With a quick Google News search I am getting two predictions reported. 0.25% and 0.5% as the Financial-Transaction Tax rate Is this tax on both ends, buy and sell? If both, that may explain why one reports 0.25% while the other reports 0.5%. Let's say someone purchases 100 shares of MSFT - at 31.00 as of the time of this post. 0.25% is $7.75 0.5% $15.50 Multiply by 10 for 1000 shares.... This would make the tax higher than the service itself. This is like a $160.00 haircut tax!!! Back to the stone age of online trading commisions, maybe even pre-stoneage, back to the oceans.
That's an interesting question, and the answer is not entirely clear ... as so often is the case with poorly thought-out legislation. The current bill is H.R. 4191. You can read it here: http://thomas.loc.gov/home/c111query.html Sec. 4475(d)(1)(A) says that the venue collects the tax. To the exchange, if person A sells and person B buys 100 shares of XYZ, that is one transaction. However, it could be interpreted that person A and B are both trading with the clearing corporation making it is two transactions. Sec. 4475(d)(1)(B) goes on to say that, if there is no exchange, the purchasers pays the tax. That seems to imply that the intent was to apply the tax only on round turns. Interesting note: This is the *second* securities transaction tax bill introduced by DeFazio this year. The first one was H.R. 1068. It is my understanding that the earlier version is identical to bills introduced into every session since 2001, which makes the argument that this has anything to do with the financial crisis particularly specious. Somebody apparently pointed out to DeFazio how impractical his earlier bill was because there were *no* exemptions and nothing to prevent traders and exchanges from moving offshore. The new version puts the responsibility of implementing the tax on the IRS, not the SEC & CFTC. It attempts to tax all transactions by Americans worldwide the way income is taxed currently. The problem is that securities transactions have nothing to do with income, and the IRS has no enforcement apparatus or experience in this area. The new bill adds exemptions for IRAs and mutual funds, and a exemption on the first $100k of transactions (worth about $25). There is still no exclusion for market makers, etc. My own opinion is that this bill is so impractical that it will go nowhere for the foreseeable future, but it bears watching ... just in case. In response to the OP, it doesn't really matter whether it is 0.25% or 0.50%. Either would be total disaster.
The Dems are saying the tax is for the relief of Main Street. Weren't we relieving Main Street and the government all along with our capital gains taxes and taxes on interests and dividends? And now they want to make us pay for government's mistakes! This is gonna be a serious issue for 2010. And this time not only retail traders and investors will be hurting, but institutional traders and institutions as well. And they want to make this tax worldwide, so they can tax Forextraders as well, and also to prevent traders to wander off to more free markets (like it happened in Germany).