
Tax the Hell Out of Wall Street; Give it to Main Street - Anon84
http://blogmaverick.com/2008/09/30/how-to-tax-wall-street-give-it-to-main-street/
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lrm242
One of the more stupider suggestions I've seen in this whole mess. Of course,
Mark Cuban doesn't care, he's got f*ck you money.

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martythemaniak
It's very simple. If you're "Too Big To Fail", that means:

a) You're too big to be private, so you'll have to be taken over.

b) You'll need to socialize your losses, so we'll need to socialize your
profits.

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bdittmer
Or we can not socialize either and let companies who make poor decisions fail.

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biohacker42
If their failure hurts us more then not allowing them to fail, then we should
really be rational.

But bailing everyone out who's too big to fail just encourages them to get
big.

So as the above poster said, we should have an almost automatic _break up, or
be nationalized_ law when ever anything gets "too big to fail"

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Prrometheus
I don't think anyone that is now arguing that some firms are too big to fail
are also arguing that we would have been better off if those firms were run by
the government in the intervening decades in which they did not fail.

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biohacker42
I should clarify what I left unspecified.

By nationalize I mean the government would take over, and then slowly but
steadily shut down operations.

This would allow smaller competitor to take up the slack.

It would also encourage companies to break up rather then be nationalized, it
wouldn't be much of a choice.

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netcan
You wouldn't need to nationalise them. You'd just need the equivalent of
antitrust legislation.

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mrtron
That idea is absolutely foolish. What about penny stocks?

This would result in reverse splits and every stock would cost thousands of
dollars to minimize this fee. Foreign exchanges would get a huge boost -
especially from stocks traded on both exchanges. Your average investor
wouldn't be able to have a balanced portfolio and share price would become a
huge issue.

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jrockway
It should probably really be a percentage, not a fixed 10 cents.

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gills
Adding friction to an otherwise efficient market is the opposite of a
solution.

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dabeeeenster
What? That's the whole problem though! The 'efficient' markets fucked up,
didn't they?

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run4yourlives
Not really. The issue is that the efficient markets were allowed to do some
things they shouldn't have been, and they did it really well.

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dabeeeenster
Then why does it matter if you slightly affect their efficiency?

This religious Friedmanite bullshit is what got us here in the first place
IMHO.

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cconstantine
Did anyone else notice that his math is off? If each sell and buy is taxed at
$.10, wouldn't the total tax on a stock transaction be $.20?

A fixed value per stock seems foolish, why not make it a percentage. And, a
percentage of the total value isn't very fair (stock values would have to go
up significantly for it to be worth buying/selling. So, we'd have to tax just
the gains... the capital gains.

Oh right, we already do that. It's called capital gains tax.

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jrockway
_Oh right, we already do that. It's called capital gains tax._

No, capital gains tax taxes gains. This will tax losses as well. It seems
"unfair", but I think this could prevent people from liquidating "slightly
bad" positions that will probably recover.

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nradov
This type of tax is usually called a "stamp tax". China has such a tax,
although it's quite low. <http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/xw/t428357.htm>

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markbao
More taxing = less investor activity, no?

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jon_dahl
Yep - but that could arguably be a good thing. Fewer daytraders, more long-
term investors, less volatility.

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TrevorJ
They are broke because WE are broke and we borrowed money to maintain our
artificially high standard of living. Basically, both the private and public
sectors of America have proven that we have no self-control. Moving money
around won't solve that problem.

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DanielBMarkham
I'm not going to vote up idiotic articles.

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Prrometheus
The title screams idiot populism.

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hugh
Indeed. I'd never heard this "Wall Street vs Main Street" meme until a few
days ago, and suddenly it's everywhere.

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fallentimes
Judging only the tax itself: it'd have to be a percentage, not a fixed amount.

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time_management
_Tax every single share of stock that is bought and sold 10 cents per
transaction. One dime._

That's a lot. Arbitrage and market-making would become much less profitable,
and liquidity would dry up, aggravating the mess.

