So... what determines a rich person? What determines a poor person? Is the poor person going to be taxed on the funds in his 401k? What about the rich person? How about bonds? I mean "junk bonds" obviously because everybody who doesn't know what those are hates them. But government bonds? Municipal bonds? School bonds? Church bonds? What about corporations? Are they being taxed on securities purchases? What about issuances of securities? What about non-profit corporations? Like, say, the NFL? Who's going to collect this tax? Who's going to monitor it? What if I buy foreign securities? What if foreigners buy our securities? __________________________________________________________ Speculation taxes are not used to raise money. They're used to curb the use of derivatives, options and other financial instruments that main street USA doesn't understand. Nader has called for them before. The British have had one since 1694. The point of doing this is it theoretically keeps Goldman Sachs from inventing things like CDOs, CDS and other alphabet-soup 3rd-order casino games by making it a pain in the ass to apply multipliers - the idea being that ten thousand options on the April 15 GM .70 can be had for pennies if you only carry it for a few days but if you charge a penny on every share you have an option on, there's a $100 "tax" which will likely kill your speculative desires, thereby discouraging people from trading options. But as far as "real" money goes, that's ten thousand shares of a stock at $31 a share and you're only pulling in a hundred bucks. So they work for that, up to a point. The problem is that the SEC is ponderously slow at coming up with new regulation because they work for the government. Investment banks, on the other hand, work for the devil so they can come up with new ways to profit off money much faster than any government regulator can dream of controlling. And even then, we're only talking about a nuisance tax, a little sand in the gears to slow things down. If you wanted to get, like, real money out of them... Your choice is 300 million americans, each crunching through the 1040, trying to pickaxe back the money that's already been withheld through an arcane system of partial self-reportage OR The toughest, nastiest, quantiest megacorporations in the world doing their damnedest to hide the money that you don't know about. Which do you think is going to generate more tax revenue?