House member Peter De-Fazio (Dem OR) runs the bridge and tunnel committee and he is the sponsor of this financial transaction tax. If he wants to pay for roads and bridges, how about charging the users who cause these needed repairs. Doesn’t that includes transportation and manufacturing workers (union members of this union) who utilize these roads and bridges. Why tax electronic traders for transportation usage-related costs?

TARP is the only semi-valid statement to charging traders (prior sponsor language) and banks have started to pay back TARP, often with fully-provided for profits – thanks to trading profits in banks.

Traders already pay high taxes on trading profits. Why tax them twice? TARP was paid back after-tax, not before too.

Is this financial-transaction tax a form of taxation or extortion? Find “where the money is” (Herbert’s NY Times story months ago) and then think up a tax to grab at more of the profits. Haven’t unions gotten into trouble before for extortion-type behavior?

Haven’t unions also done enough recently to help bankrupt the manufacturing industries in America with chasing jobs to Asia? Do they now want to also bankrupt traders and send those financial jobs out of this country too?

Shouldn’t unions be reconsidered for trust busting as monopolies or oligarchies? Don’t union members band together to collude on fixing (wages) prices and collude on strikes and other activities too?

Ads of Detroit auto workers usually show many over-weight older workers (not all of course) and they have a bad rep for poor qualify and higher health care costs. Their jobs are protected by the unions at all expense – even the company’s survival. Compare that to younger and more fit Asian workers; often beating them in the marketplace. Even the non-union auto workers of America’s South, with Asian-brand factories do much better in the marketplace.

If unions and other sponsors of the financial transaction tax want to rein in unproductive behavior, then why calculate all the money they will make on this extortion tax (which they have done)? Licking their chops of this potential tax windfall shows it’s really a greedy money grab and it’s not their true intention to stop fast trading.

Fast (super-computerized) trading is the new villain that is bringing back the financial transaction tax now. This tax has been shot down by leadership on each prior try.

How is trading (fast or slow) any less productive than building gas guzzlers that require cash for clunker programs later on, that require waste landfill fill-ups that ruin the environment and don’t help this country much? How about soda manufacturing workers, or fat food workers, or other industries that lead to problems for society? Is a new ethic’s czar going to decide what is productive and what is not? Traders provide liquidity, an important element of crucial financial markets – without which we all would be bartering on the farm – and much more (been discussed by many others earlier). Trading is a clean and legal means to making an admirable living. In fact, fast trading profits on Wall Street saved us all from a depression and sinking our financial system.

If unions fail in America, we will survive – maybe even turn around our slide into fewer jobs – but if traders fail, we are all sunk.

Don’t make traders an offer they can’t refuse and extort them out of business. It’s patently un-American, unethical and the wrong thing to do.

Isn’t it coldly ironic, that perverse progressive-left policies have lead to job cuts that have turned more people into online traders, as their last resort on making a living. Now the progressives want to fully bury these traders work-wise and put them on public welfare.

Robin Hood works when the rich are bad and Robin Hood is good. What about when the rich are good and Robin Hood is a just a plane old fashioned crook?

This is a perfect example of why America isn’t great anymore. It used to be “BECOME THE RICHIES!”

- Posted by Bob

Hopefully, they’ll greet you with guns. Make your own d@mn lunch, beggar. I worked hard for mine.

- Posted by Cordell

Cordell,

You can obviously afford a computer. My monitor is going. Give me yours.