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Guess we'll just have to make sure they talk to Howard in Australia about their experience with the APT, and check into the studies that exist concerning its effects in South America as well.

http://www.webmeets.com/files/papers/lacea/2002/176/BT111101.pdf

Disintermediation and Illiquidity in a Bank Account Debits Tax Model
P.H. Albuquerque
November 11, 2001

Nevertheless authors such as Umlauf(1993), Hkkio(1994), Shome and Stotsky(1995), Jones and Seguin(1997), and Habermeir and Kirilenko argued or found evidence that FTTs not only AA unable to deliver the benefits thought out by their proponents but also can lead to undesired economic distortions.

Tanzi(2000) and Coelho, Ebrill and Summers(2001) reach different conclusion based on the experiences of Australia and some Latin-American countries that have adopted BAD taxation.⁵ As a rule, the BAD tax experiments failed in Latin America. The following negative consequences were common: financial disntermediation, increased size of the hidden-economy, a sharp and then a slow and constant reduction of financial transactions volume, disappointing revenues (generally smaller than 1% of GDP) no matter the tax rate (which varied from 0.2 to 2.0% effective), shift of capital market transactions to New York, increased use of offshore banking, inefficient merging and vertical integration, increased use of currency and bank account substitutes, and establishment of nonbank clearinghouses.

Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, once referring to a proposal of substituting all taxes in Australia by a BAD tax, declared: "It would completely render comatose a workable financial system in a very rapid period of time. And in a global world in which we now live we'd basically be saying that we're opting out oand going back to the jungle. I think, with great respect to whoever is advocating it ... it's a crazy idea."

Gregory and Zell, you say. I can think of a few others as well that should be apprised of the situation.

Well, I'm no economist myself. I would hope that the people who actually have a direct effect on these types of policies would do all the appropriate research. If the plan is as flawed as you say it is, I imagine it would be discarded rather quickly. And I don't imagine if it was that Mr. Jenner would be calling me back to say "hey, we looked at that plan and it's crap". I'm just a guy with an idea. The important thing to remember is that in the end, they are just higher paid guys who know other higher paid guys. Maybe one of them will run with it.