Originally posted by DMT
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From the article "A well-designed financial transaction tax (FTT)—a small levy placed on the sale of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other investments—would be an efficient and progressive way to generate tax revenues."
Yeah, I would probably stay away from this one as it seems to be just another money grab for the federal government. Plus, I would imagine that the cost of these transactions would be "deductible" to the individual selling for a "gain" as it would be double taxing the same dollar. Unless of course you exclude it from the reported gain on their tax form or provide some documentation to the client as to the amount of levies they paid during the year to then reduce their taxable debt.
As I breeze through the article - it seems that much of the focus for this "progressive" tax is actually wealth re-distribution.
"Gross revenues from a well-designed FTT would likely range from $110 billion to $403 billion. And net revenues (including offsets from reduced income, payroll and capital gains taxes, and increased borrowing costs) would likely be substantially higher than some other recent estimates indicate. This is mainly because other estimates’ assumptions about the volume of financial transactions an FTT would crowd out are too high, and because an FTT is likely to redistribute rather than reduce overall incomes."
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