A Wall Street tax would be federal. In education, federal meddling has sometimes proven good, but usually it proves bad. You get all the strings, but the funding isn't there to cover them. Considering that the federal government, which has helped public education so much in the last 30 years is now interested in spreading their magic to "protect" college kids from "private colleges"--which actually means any college, public or private, 2- or 4-year, once you get past the "sales pitch" and look at the "contract"--just no.
Dependence on Wall Street bit NY State in the ass repeatedly. You tax bonuses, etc., and they provide a lot of income and hurt those we enjoy hurting. But then when times are tight the first thing that happens is you lose a large proportion of your state income because the tax base is effectively quite narrow. Calif. has the same problem. It would hit at precisely the same time that the funding was most necessary.
A small tax would also reduce stock prices or reduce the effective ROI. That's meaningless if you don't own stocks, but if you do that can hurt over the course of years. We think "billionaire playboys" and "wealthy hedge funds." But that also goes for people like my father, who was a steelworker and had an IRA from his lump-sum pension distribution and also for the DCP that I still (nominally) have with a state pension fund. When we hear about how the 1% control so much wealth, there's a caveat: We read it as "they control X% of the (total) wealth," but the source material typically says "they control X% of the privately-held wealth." Pension funds control a lot of $$. Some are state or federal, some are union held, some are held in trust by organizations set up to manage specific pensions.
In other words, just don't focus on those you intend to punish or tax. Focus on all of those you'd tax and punish. Sometimes we think intent is meaningless; sometimes we think that blind intent provides some sort of papal indulgence.
Moreover, given that it's easier and easier to be listed on overseas exchanges ... The stock market is already a corporation and has run the numbers of how much traffic it's lost and what they'd like to do to attract more traffic.
No doom and gloom here. But issues that take the glow off that particular rose.
= new reply since forum marked as read