they should read this http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/27/news/economy/The_onion_conundrum_Birger.fortune/
We all will, eventually. And the longer we defer it, the more painful it will be. So again, sorry, but I'll take a pass on this special interest project.
You are incredibly foolish. I will not be paying it. I'll make my market wider and YOU will pay it. But if you want to pay....who am I to stop you?
Saw this on another site, wasn't written by me but I thought it was well stated. This is what your congressman needs to see. I am a professional trader considered by the exchange a "liquidity provider". At any given time during the trading day I have 100+ orders bidding and offering stock. These are the orders that your broker, mutual fund, pension fund etc. use to buy or sell stock. This market making service is the reason you can buy or sell a stock at any given time on any given day. I trade over 2,000,000 shares per month on average, and there are several thousand people like me in the makets accounting for billions of shares (on exchange floors, and in offices around the country). Most of us are self employed or work for small outfits NOT wall street banks. This and other forms of short term high frequency trading activity make up the majority of the volume in the market while providing incomes for tax paying families like mine, not to mention more consistant returns on investment in pension funds, endowments, charities, family trusts, etc. This tax would put me and just about every active trader like me out of business overnight. Profits margins in this business are razor thin when you net out winning vs. losing trades. This tax would amount to 100% tax on my income, and destroy returns of the pension funds, endowments, charities, family trusts, etc. mentioned before. Penalizing small business operators, retirement funds, and other productive organizations. For those bitter souls who do not care about adding thousands more to the unemployed workforce consider this: the tax would generate only a fraction of what you suggest because much of the annual volume used to come up with these figures would disappear. With that volume goes the short term capital gains tax we pay currently as well. My industry had nothing to do with the meltdown in the CDO, CDS, Mortgage, and swap markets. In fact part of the current problem is the lack of a centralized, transparent, liquid, market for the assets that the banks are trying to unload. (TARP's original intent was to make a market for these) Gentlemen, this is exactly what the US stock market has done successfully for over 100 years. It is the envy of every foreign exchange on the planet. And for the past 20 or so years the barriers to entry have been taken down making it possible for non wall street small "mainstreet" participants like myself or anyone with the inclination to fairly compete. Furthermore, the next time you suggest we do not provide a service ask someone trying to sell real estate in Florida, California, NV, or any other hard hit area in this country how nice it would be to have a ready buyer in a liquid, robust, market that would complete the transaction within seconds of submitting property for sale! Or ask the any commercial bank, the Treasury Department, Congressman, Senentor, or taxpayer forced to buy assets because they have no central liquid marketplace how nice it would be to have thousands of willing participants ready to purchase within seconds of submitting the offer for sale. The centralized, liquid, transparent, stock, futures, and options exchanges and the 1000's of traders, members, floor brokers, pension funds, endowments, charities, around the country would be significantly hobbled buy this type of tax. This is something we can not afford to let happen.