Trump: Amazon not paying enough taxes

[Loren Pechtel]

But my point is that many people like myself are "temporarily" flush with cash flow because my current income is greater than my current expenses. However, I only have about 10 more years to work. In the future, my expenses will dramatically outstrip my current income. I need to fund my retirement and still support 10 family members (upcoming college expenses keeps me up at night!).

A 1% trade tax won't be a serious problem for such long term investing.

Secondly, I do think that we need to encourage investment. Too many people are counting on SSN to fund their retirement. They go cruises and buy fancy cars rather than save for the future.

Here you're right. We have a lot of people who can't save rather than spend and they feel they should be taken care of by those who have more--never mind that most of that having more is because of more prudent spending.

 

[Elixir]

It's bad math. The problem is that 1% is based on the current trading rate. Make trading more expensive and you'll see less trading.

That's okay. DO THE MATH. If trading fell off by 60% a 1% tax would STILL more than cover all the income tax revenues. As far as "less trading = worse economy", that's BS. Mor money in the pockets of the middle class = more spending (vs parasitic investment) = stronger economy.

It would fall off far more than 60%. The problem is arbitrage trading, high frequency trading and the like--cases where they expect a small profit fast. That's most of the trade volume--and it utterly vanishes if you put a 1% tax on trades.

That would be a GOOD thing IMO. I had about $200,000 in cash on Friday (an extremely rare situation for me, and makes me uncomfortable). I strongly considered buying an index fund at the end of the trading day, figuring that it was almost guaranteed to be worth 1% more on Monday morning... but didn't do that, preferring to hold on a bit and make longer term investments. I'm sure that thousands of day-traders did do that though - and they're out this morning with their 1.12% (or thereabouts) gains in hand. I don't see how that kind of activity helps the economy, helps growing Companies or anyone else besides the day-trader, whose portfolio now has 1% greater power to suck money out of the system. They're not going to spend it, it's like vanished money from the economy.

 

[Horatio Parker]

It's bad math. The problem is that 1% is based on the current trading rate. Make trading more expensive and you'll see less trading.

That's okay. DO THE MATH. If trading fell off by 60% a 1% tax would STILL more than cover all the income tax revenues. As far as "less trading = worse economy", that's BS. Mor money in the pockets of the middle class = more spending (vs parasitic investment) = stronger economy.

It would fall off far more than 60%. The problem is arbitrage trading, high frequency trading and the like--cases where they expect a small profit fast. That's most of the trade volume--and it utterly vanishes if you put a 1% tax on trades.

All the better. HFT amounts to a tax anyway. Completely unproductive bullshit.

 

[Underseer]

So it's agreed?

Trump was wrong to say this?

If you are criticizing Trump, why do you hate America? What's so great about communism? Don't you know that communism failed?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It would fall off far more than 60%. The problem is arbitrage trading, high frequency trading and the like--cases where they expect a small profit fast. That's most of the trade volume--and it utterly vanishes if you put a 1% tax on trades.

All the better. HFT amounts to a tax anyway. Completely unproductive bullshit.

HFT I agree on, arbitrage trades serve a useful purpose.

However, the point is that if you eliminate those trades the tax doesn't yield nearly as much as the proponents think it will.