This has to be the most idiotic tax proposal I've ever heard.
Implementing a tax on financial flows will drive those transactions offshore and ruin our financial markets. It will have an effect on our economy similar to dumping sand into an internal combustion engine.
Politically, Ted Kennedy will be nominated by the Republicans before this would get enacted. Any politician insane enough to propose this wouldn't get a loan from any financial institution in the country. Declaring war on the money industry will kill any politician's career in five minutes (outside of those politicians representing Communist areas like Berzerkly, Ithica and Madison).
Only an academic nut safely protected from the real world could propose such an ignorant scheme.
I sure the President of the U of Wisconsin will be happy to read this trash. Good luck fundraising with this ignoramus alienating the financial community.
Your tax dollars at work!
There's the first sensible objection I've seen here yet.
As far as any concern about "alienating" the lawyers and accountants that benefit from the current scheme ... I'll just be nice and say that I wouldn't mind alienating them. :)
Brazil once tried to impose a tax on securities transactions. Their stock market still hasn't recovered from the utter evacuation of capital which this caused. I cannot believe that a professor of economics has seriously proposed this idea, unless he is a flaming Marxist.
sounds like the dreaded VAT.
tax at every transaction that occurs related to production of goods and services.
There is another category: really bad academics, whether isolated or not.
Your tax dollars at work!
Fortunately, this is not the case: the author is professor emeritus.
Umm riddle me this ratman; if you move all your transactions overseas, how do you use that money here at home? At some point money would have to move back into this country for you to use it, at which time the tax would kick in. Otherwise you would have to move overseas, and be subjected to even more progressive, socialist tax schemes.
I haven't thought through this proposal so I won't accept or dismiss it out of hand, but I like the idea that other people are starting to think about a better way of dealing with taxes.
Its not the taxes I mind paying (although the lower the better), I object to the all the crap, hoops, loopholes, and other .... stuff, in our overly complex tax code.
The IRS HAS TO GO!