Is A Wall Street Transaction Tax Still Being Talked About And Considered?......

[DFW]

3. The devil is always in the details

Stocks are traded either by brokers or online, and there is always a tiny transaction fee, which keeps the brokers/brokerages in business. Take a piece out of that and a lot of somebodies are out of a job. Put it on top, then there might be less stocks traded. The administration of such a tax would take either a lot of manpower or else a lot of computer-generated fees which are then hackable.

It's always good propaganda to yell "Wall Street!" and "billionayahs!" but if you're going to "stick it to them," you had better do it in such a fashion that spreads the pain around and makes for little to no increase in paperwork and fraud opportunities. I would simply raise the top income tax bracket from 39.6% to 42.5% for income over $350,000 (making state income taxes again deductible) and then close a lot of loopholes. But maybe that doesn't create the kind of enemy that makes an easy enough target for campaign slogans.