Turning Pennies Into Billion$: The Tiny Tax that Wall Street Fears - See more at:

[eridani]

http://www.occupy.com/article/turning-pennies-billion-tiny-tax-wall-street-fears

In Chicago – where hunger strikers are protesting school closures, where school closures result from throwing public money into risky Wall Street ventures, where risky ventures happen under the nose of venture-capitalist-in-chief Rahm Emanuel – people want a financial transaction tax.

Lara Weber of the Chicago Tribune editorial board describes a recent town hall meeting in Chicago where the mayor attended. It was a budget meeting with 500 people, many of whom “took time to register for their allotted 60 seconds of microphone time and got their brief chance to address the mayor,” writes Weber, and asked “thoughtful questions about why the city’s red-light camera system is still in place, despite its deep flaws. They asked how the mayor intends to prioritize child care funding. They recommended that Emanuel pursue a financial transaction tax.”

The mayor, whose loyalties are clear, loathes the idea of a financial transaction tax for the same reason that Wall Street fears it – not because it would be especially cumbersome (read on), but because it represents a democratically-imposed limit on the financial class against doing whatever it wants with our money.

A financial transaction tax (FTT) is a tiny charge placed on financial (rather than consumer) transactions. It can range from a dime to fifty cents per $1,000 exchanged. Many countries have particular transaction taxes – Peru for foreign wire transfers, Finland for Finnish securities and derivatives, France for stock purchases of publicly traded French companies with a market value over €1 billion. Brazil used to have a financial transaction tax, then it didn’t, and now it wants one again.

Supporters of an FTT in the U.S. have been pushing the plan for years, though it’s not as alluring, loud or radical-sounding as public banks or worker-owned cooperatives. Experts on the tax tell me that global cooperation will make it work even better (money travels easily) and that we can start it anywhere – particularly in cities where financial trading is concentrated, like New York and Chicago.

I recently spoke with James Henry, an attorney, senior fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable International Investment, and an adviser to the Tax Justice Network. Henry says the financial transaction tax, which is designed to extract money from high-frequency trading – 68% of which is controlled by nine powerful banks, including some with criminal convictions – is a “positive project” for economic justice advocates. “Simple and intelligible,” an open-and-shut case.

[PoliticAverse]

1. The problem that the article mentions is that "money travels easily"

so such taxes can be relatively easily avoided by most large players.

The Wikipedia page on the issue has a lot of information on the issue...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax

Note that the US actually does currently have a tax on stock transactions, it is used to fund the SEC.

See: http://www.sec.gov/answers/sec31.htm

[eridani]

2. Until most of the rest of the world catches on to the idea n/t

[PoliticAverse]

3. We can't get the "rest of the world" to catch on to the corporate profit issue

which is why companies like Apple and Google have billions in tax haven countries.

[eridani]

4. There are ways of going after tax havens

I can bullshit on the attitude that rich people are so powerful that the rest of us are utterly helpless to do anything about it.