“We can also be a bit clever about cracking down on evaders. Suppose that we gave a reward of 10 percent of the tax collected to workers who turn in their bosses. There are few Wall Street billionaires that physically do the trading themselves. They have assistants for this task. And many of these assistants would be happy to make themselves rich by turning in their bosses.

In reality, the idea that a tax on speculation is unenforceable is laughable on its face. Compare the difficulties of enforcing a speculation tax with enforcing copyrights. In the case of a speculation tax, the issue is a relatively small number of very large transactions. No one cares if trades involving a few thousand dollars go untaxed. The real issue is a relatively small number of trades involving millions, or even billions, of dollars.

By contrast, copyright enforcement is all about billions of small transactions involving movies with a copyright-protected price of $15 or $20 or songs with a copyright-protected price of less than a dollar. The problem of enforcing copyrights is several orders of magnitudes greater than the problem of enforcing a financial transaction tax. Yet, none of those insisting on the impossibility of enforcing financial transactions taxes have said that copyrights are unenforceable. The issue is clearly what they want to enforce, not a question of what is enforceable.

The country does need to let itself be ripped off by the Wall Street crew indefinitely. We can make them pay a price for the damage they have caused. We just have to stop listening to the Wall Street apologists and get serious.”

My Comment

Two questions and a wince:

Question: Are we to assume from this that after the taxes you already pay on capital gains from trading, you are going to be further taxed, because, thanks to inventors and businessmen, costs in trading have come down?

Question: And are we to believe that this will affect only million dollar trades, but not the few thousands that many more investors are concerned with?

Wince: Did I hear that people are going to be given incentives to report their bosses?

Whoa!

We already have the SEC and FBI bribing people to inform on other people. Personally, I think an informant who receives money for his information should be disregarded.

What happened to doing your civic duty as a virtue?

Do citizens have to be bribed to perform duties (assuming you think, which I don´t, that turning in tax evaders is part of your moral duty)?

(Of course, we already bribe them to fight, bribe them to make babies, bribe them to vote, bribe them to run businesses…socialism being the society built on bribery rather than on demand).

And that´s only one part of the problem with this….