Financial Transactions Tax

[Kerim]

Call me a socialist, but at first glance this FTT thing strikes me as a pretty good idea. It would raise a lot of revenue while having a cooling effect on some of the more pernicious facets of the financial industry? I hadn't heard anything about it before reading this one article, so consider me completely ignorant about the two sides of the question -- I'm sure there are good arguments against it too. Would love to hear opinions.

[EricL]

If I had even the slightest faith at all that the government would spend the money wisely I may agree with you that this is worth considering.

Unfortunately that isn't the case.

[Jimbo]

I have not even heard of it but agree with Eric whole heartedly.
Jim

[earthtodan]

I think taxing short term trades would be fine, since it's essentially gambling. The government may be a poor spender but part of the reason for that is the continuous lack of funding of education. So if the proposal is to have the government funnel the money straight into education, great, I see nothing to oppose on the face of it. Poor use of our tax dollars in general is a tangential argument. Funding education is one of the smartest uses of public money. Steve Jobs used to complain to the president about how American schools are not producing enough skilled workers, forcing him to hire from overseas. Here is someone trying to address the problem.

There's nothing socialist about publicly funded education; it's foundational to American prosperity and I would not want to live in a country without it.

[navyasw02]

I think this is a terrible idea and I disagree with this article's assessment that "Wall Street will bear almost the entire cost of the tax." When does Wall Street bear the cost of anything without passing it along to the consumers? When I first read about this last week, the plan said a .5% tax on all trades over $100 with the premise of "taxing the rich." It didnt say .5% tax except for people investing in their retirement accounts or individual investors outside of the top tax bracket. That means when you strip off all the BS feel good election hype, it's just another sales tax which will go into a poorly managed bureaucratic education fund that will be so littered with red tape that the people who need the funds wont get it or wont qualify because of restrictive income brackets just like with other Federal Student Aid. If we want to get real with education reform in the US, we need to fully fund our public schools and make it so Federal student loans are so abundant and cost effective that they put the private loan providers out of business.