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[McTraveller]

ugh I've been busy, the thread has moved on...

The suggestion of 30% transaction tax on stock sales was deliberately high to intentionally discourage stock sales.  Society as a whole doesn't really benefit from high stock volumes.  "But liquidity!" you cry... yeah people don't really use stocks for liquidity, they use it for arbitrage and stuff.  Perhaps some small portion of stock sales are for liquidity, but the vast majority is for speculation and contributes to systematic issues.

Make it hard to sell stocks and yeah you might have some problems in the system, but you will have gotten rid a huge number of other ways to abuse the system.

[Iduno]

Haha, Joe Biden who famously told people in Wisconsin that it was safe to vote in person, and that people should avoid voting electronically if possible, refuses to go to Wisconsin to accept the presidential nomination.

[Reelya]

ugh I've been busy, the thread has moved on...

The suggestion of 30% transaction tax on stock sales was deliberately high to intentionally discourage stock sales.  Society as a whole doesn't really benefit from high stock volumes.  "But liquidity!" you cry... yeah people don't really use stocks for liquidity, they use it for arbitrage and stuff.  Perhaps some small portion of stock sales are for liquidity, but the vast majority is for speculation and contributes to systematic issues.

Make it hard to sell stocks and yeah you might have some problems in the system, but you will have gotten rid a huge number of other ways to abuse the system.

It's just not going to work. Shares in the beginning are mainly a way to raise capital to get things off the ground. A 30% share trading tax would basically be the same as outlawing share sales since nobody will take that trade, which would mean no ventures get off the ground with additional funding, which at the end of the day will mean that only the rich can own and run things, and the money stays in families. It would massively curtail social mobility. The next best option would be loans from investor funds, so are you also going to say that the government takes a 30% tax out whenever someone gets a loan, and that you can't refinance a loan without paying another 30% tax on that?

The tax would also be massively unfair. So you buy $1000 worth of shares, but say the government demand %30 tax on top, then the person actually pays $1300 for the shares. Then, say the person decides they need to sells the shares are you going to also charge an entire 30% tax that time too. Great, now you've taxed the person $600 when they didn't actually make any money. Not only won't it work, from any economics standpoint, the idea is nonsensical.

You also need to take into account the alternatives to shares, because all those things are going to be super-attractive to investors with cash once you effectively can't buy shares any more (and nobody is going to buy or sell shares if there's a 30% tax on it, it's just not a thing people have to absorb when it's easily side-stepped). A lot of investors in shares are pension funds, so what you'd be doing is telling pension funds that they can no longer choose that option to invest people's retirement money in. Even if the share market will, in the long term, always turn a profit, nobody's going to want to, or have to, put people's money in that if there's a 30% up front loss. They'll just entirely side-step the entire legislation you've enacted by coming up with new financial instruments that you didn't think of. So you'd have to blanket-tax every conceivable type of transaction 30% to cover your bases. It really doesn't take rocket science to realize that if we implemented a blanket 30% tax on all transactions of all types, which would be needed to avoid loopholes, then the economy would grind to a halt very quickly.

The end result would be massive deflation, which you seem to think is a good thing. But what that would actually mean is that those with liquid wealth would have all the wealth, there would be virtually no transactions or liquid capital available to the regular people, and since because of deflation the value of a dollar has shot to the moon, GDP would crash, while (in real terms) the national debt suddenly inflates times 100. And no, the taxes collected won't pay down the debt. There are less than $2 trillion US dollars in circulation, which is less than 10% of the national debt. Sucking that money out of circulation will cause huge deflation, and since the national debt is pegged to the dollar, then the debt will suddenly balloon out in real terms, so the only people receiving any money will be those holding treasury bonds.

[McTraveller]

If the argument is 30% is too big, sure fine.  I think the crap like 0.01% or whatever that was floating around in various proposals was too low.  How about "typical" sales tax levels, in the 5-10% range?

[Reelya]

That's not going to work, because the entire industry will just side-step a fee that large, and you can't really stop them doing that. The point of the small transaction fee is that it totally disincentivizes those rapid transactions without actually destroying the entire point of having a stock exchange. If you put a 5-10% fee on all transactions, then all the stock exchanges will close down and they'll do something else to raise money, but of course whatever they pick will have been a second-choice, so it almost certainly won't be as efficient. There are plenty of other investment opportunities that don't eat up an instant 5% of your wealth. The reason a sales tax works is that you need the thing now so you're willing to pay that to get it. You don't need to pay 5% to turn one type of wealth into a different type of wealth. So they'll do other things such as money lending instead of buying shares. So you've crashed the sharemarkets to nothing, but all the activity has moved over into debt-based investment. Also: currency speculation is a thing, and a lot of the trade will move over into that, and it's a harder sell to say the government is going to hit you with a 10% fee just to change your money over when you visit. That'd kill a number of industries including tourism (if it wasn't already dead though).

This will happen in the same way it happened where if states brought in too many heavy-handed laws all of a sudden that covered employees, well, now everyone's a contractor, not an employee. You'll have to define what a share is and what share trading is for your tax law, but then they'll get their lawyers onto it, and they'll come up with some other way of exchanging value that isn't by definition a share, according to whatever your legislation defined it as.

[misko27]

Oooh I found something this thread might be interested in. NY Times Opinion Columnist Gail Collins has posed a question that I would like to forward to the thread: Who is the worst member of the Trump Cabinent? As Trump himself tends to just... tweet most days, much of actual governing is left to staff. And the competition for worst of the bunch is fierce.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'd say Barr is the worst. He's both clever and brutal in his evil, and also he might have been the one to give the order on Epstein. Moreover, he's doing a lot of the leg work defending the administration legally - several other members of this list would be been sidelined by the courts without his influence.

[Reelya]

Might as well just stump for the whole Qanon thing then. Do we have evidential sources that it was an inside job, or just general skepticism here?

https://www.ft.com/content/8f406516-0c9e-11ea-b2d6-9bf4d1957a67

right now you have everyone claiming it's patently obvious that everyone else did it, so it really is, as the article states a Choose Your Own Adventure as to who you want to claim was "obviously" the person behind it, and everyone just picks whoever fits their pet hates. So Trump people claim it was the Clintons, you're claiming it was Barr etc etc.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Imagine conflating the most obvious political assassination in years with the wackiest conspiracy theory ever.

[Reelya]

Everyone's just picking their partisan enemies however and claiming that was who did it. Show me some articles listing the facts so i have more than hot air. Like, most things that have evidence, people at least drop a link, so I should have been schooled by now, but i only hear ad hoc rumor mongering. William Barr is just a name you pulled out of a hat because you don't like the guy. i don't like him either, but being a prick doesn't prove he's a conspiracy mastermind.

It would have been more sensible to have him killed off a lot sooner. Far easier and less paper trail than having to bribe guards and rig things in jail. That'd really need complicity at city, state, federal level, both parties to be in on it. Basically I don't think they could keep a secret like this. Do you think Trump could actually order that and they not cock it up?

EDIT: as counter-evidence, Epstein actually authored and signed a new will just days before his death:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/22/jeffrey-epstein-trust-fund-will-damages

I guess we could add another lay of conspiracy about this whole will / trust-fund thing, how they forced him to sign it etc etc etc. But it's already getting a fair bit more convoluted right there. So, the lawyers who were party to this new will were clearly in on the conspiracy and Epstein should have clearly known something was up. you're not forced to sign a new will then surprised when a few days later they fake CCTV footage, bribe the guards then fake a suicide.

[ZBridges]

The only legitimate political conspiracy is that birds aren't real.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I didn't pick Barr at random, I picked him because he's served as Trump's triggerman for stuff like the Lafayette Park attacks. In my opinion he replaced Michael Cohen in that role.

I think basic logic holds that if both Trump and Clinton are on the flight logs, then both might want Epstein dead before he talks. But the Clintons are just a bunch of rich assholes now, and Trump controls both all the violent branches of the government and his own filthy enforcers. Ergo, the most likely person to have killed Epstein is someone who is in some way ultimately acting for Trump. Barr fits the bill, or at least he held the bill at some point.

Now, if the question is whether or not Epstein was murdered at all, then I think the idea that he could possibly kill himself under the close watch he was supposed to be under is the real conspiratorial one. It's unfathomable that only the cameras in front of Epstein's cell would be the ones to malfunction on the very night of the "suicide". His cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione, a multiple murderer and ex-cop, tried to kill him once that we know of. He was probably the one meant to actually do the deed.

Then there's all the complexities of the autopsy that are wrong for hanging, snapped hyoid bone, eye hemorrhages, wounds on the arms, wrist, and one shoulder.

Ultimately, the fact is that the evidence we've got is the evidence we've got until someone has a deathbed confession. Everything else has been purged, burned, and shot five times in the back of the head by now. If it's not enough for you to make a decision...well, you're going to have to make a decision on what you believe anyway, because this is it.

[Reelya]

It might as well be Prince Andrew then. But a million other people were connected with Epstein, note the whole Marvin Minsky thing, where Epstein apparently tried to get one of his girls to seduce Minsky, but Minsky turned her down. Minsky was still tarred by association however, so his reputation suffered. But the point is Epstein was associated with everyone. We'd definitely need more evidence than that to narrow it down to Trump.

[MrRoboto75]

Who is the worst member of the Trump Cabinent?

All of them.  The world could be a vastly better place overnight if the WH got burned down a second time.

[Eschar]

Marvin Minsky the AI researcher?