?
?Charge sales tax on stocks and bonds at the same rate as on every
?consumer item?
?
Ideally yes.
A flat tax of 0.1% on every single transaction that takes place is the fairest form of taxation. This form of tax would (currently) net more income than all the current sales and income taxes that are out there. The financial world runs on (large amounts of) money changing hands very quickly.
The benefit to the individual is obvious. You have effectively a 0.1% income tax when you are given money and a 0.1% sales tax whenever something is bought.
This would of course end up slowing down the big money financial world and would have many economic repercussions because this small percentage would eat significantly into the profit generated from these transactions. On the other hand it encourages investment, decreases inflation and provides a very real economic advantage for developing countries.
Why doesn't this happen now? Two reasons.
Firstly the monetary system would need to be fully (or near so) computerized , with an integrated taxation system, to track this. Which it is not even in developed countries, and it would require world wide adoption of principles like this to avoid offshore relocation of financial centers.
Secondly, the powers that be, those that control legislation (and I'm not trying to evoke any conspiracy theories here), have a vested interest in the current taxation paradigm. They make a lot of money for themselves through transactions leveraging less than 1% profits (sometimes very minimal) on very large amounts of money.
Financial utopias are nice to dream about, but there are very real, very human, greedy people that control the way things are. The length of a term in (most) governments is 3-6 years. The amount of time it takes to make a real economic change? Substantially longer.
Daniel Dixon
"Insolvency abuse is the worst form of financial addiction"