Sanders to propose canceling $1.6 trillion in US student debt

[HerbChestnut]

100. In that example, you're right, but that's an extreme case.

Most stock trades involve sums of money significantly smaller than $10m. On the NYSE, the average cost per transaction is somewhere around $25k (Source: publicly available NYSE data that is scattered around the internet, numbers that are very rough). The 0.5% tax would add $127 to the average NYSE transaction. Multiply that by the average number of daily transactions (roughly 2.5 million) X 365 days X 10 years and you get roughly $1.2T over a ten year period from the NYSE alone. Throw in other markets and it's not hard to see where the $2T+ comes from. Will some stock behavior change as a result of an extra -0.5% rate of return? Maybe a little, but probably not for the person investing $25k.

Disclaimer: These numbers are rough. Very rough. But they were the best I could find on short notice.