I tend to agree. Trading stocks is essentially gambling but almost worse. The odds are rigged but you don’t know by whom abs how much. It’s a game of skill, except not entirely. The house always wins except there are multiple houses and you can lose to all of them.
I think investing is a different beast: that is going long on a company, industry, or the market in general. You reasonably know that the market will over time go up. With specific industries or stocks you take a bit more risk but you are still buying ownership of a thing and things tend to become more expensive over time unless a better thing comes along. But short term gains chasing, especially as a retail investor is just gambling.
Stick a 1% tax on all share buys and use to reduce income tax for working people, or just issue it as a cheque at the end of the year that people can invest.
Financial transaction taxes have been introduced in any number of countries, the majority of which have ended up repealing them: the tax raised on transactions is outweighed by the loss of capital gains caused by a reduced number of transactions occurring. And in today's global financial system you could end up like Sweden, where introducing an FTT saw 80% of trading move to London within a year...
I think investing is a different beast: that is going long on a company, industry, or the market in general. You reasonably know that the market will over time go up. With specific industries or stocks you take a bit more risk but you are still buying ownership of a thing and things tend to become more expensive over time unless a better thing comes along. But short term gains chasing, especially as a retail investor is just gambling.