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April 2, 2019
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, announced today that he would soon release a proposal to eliminate massive tax breaks enjoyed by the wealthy on their capital gains income. If successful, the proposal would ensure that income from wealth is taxed just like income from work.
His plan, which he has promised to flesh out in a white paper in the coming weeks, would tax the appreciation of assets owned by the very wealthy as income each year, an approach known as mark-to-market taxation. It would also subject that income to ordinary tax rates rather than special, lower income tax rates that apply to capital gains.
https://itep.org/sweeping-reform-would-tax-capital-gains-like-ordinary-income/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-democrat-proposes-annual-tax-on-unrealized-capital-gains-11554217383
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday April 07 2019, @12:37AM (33 children)
Tax high-frequency trades. Not much, just 0.1% per trade. Those guys are playing with the US economy like it's their personal, private casino.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by old kiwi on Sunday April 07 2019, @12:49AM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @01:36AM
No, just ditch HFT and futures trading. Absolutely not the "real economy" and should be isolated as gambling.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by black6host on Sunday April 07 2019, @02:44AM
Personal private casino? Absolutely! It's helpful though to look back on history and see what drives all this. We're no different than we were 2000 years ago. We just have the capacity to kill earth. All the while taking the short term gains at the casino...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stretch611 on Sunday April 07 2019, @03:58AM (2 children)
High Frequency trades are actually realized gains/losses, on the actual trade. So, the " mark-to-market tax concept" where taxes are applied annually would not apply.
However, increasing the maximum capital gains tax to the tax bracket of the seller would apply and make a difference on HFTs.
Taxing HFTs was not mentioned in the linked articles. However, I am agreeable with that idea... Personally I would extend that to any security held less than one full year... even add a 0.1% fee on the market value of losses sold in less than one year. IMHO, if you regularly hold stocks for less than a year, you are gambling, NOT investing. And because a lot of people hold stocks for such a short period of time, we get board of directors more interested in short term gains for a quick stock bump than long term investment in the actual company for greater gains later.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Sunday April 07 2019, @06:22AM
I agree: tax HFTs. But I would go farther, and have a scaling tax on stock sales. As other posters have pointed out, one really wants to encourage long-term investment, as opposed to short-term gambling. The squawks of the HFT companies that they are "adding liquidity" to the market is crap - the stock market worked just fine before they existed. So, a scaling tax: Hold an asset for less than a minute: pay 100% tax on the transaction value. Hold an asses for less than an hour, pay 50%. Less than a day, 25%. Anything held for a year or more has no transaction tax at all.
That said, Ryden does have a point: If you are rich enough, you can live off of your wealth while paying virtually no taxes. There is a genuine argument that multigenerational wealth needs to be broken up. If you, yourself, manage to make $billions, more power to you. However, what benefit does society have, by allowing your wealth to establish a dynasty? If he can figure out a way to break up multigenerational dynasties, more power to him. However, it isn't likely - at that level, the dynasties establish trusts and "charities", or just move their wealth to overseas tax havens.
Unfortunately, it is far more likely that Ryden's idea will simply be a sneaky way to tax people's retirement accounts, thus nailing the middle class yet again.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @07:09AM
This is already the way taxes work in the US. Capital gains are split into "short-term" and "long-term" where the line between the two is holding the asset for at least a year. "Short-term" gains are taxed as normal income, not at the favored capitol gains rate used for long-term gains.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @10:46AM (13 children)
Obviously written by someone who has zero idea what they are talking about.
HFTs are basically 100% a force for good. HFTs provide tremendous liquidity to the overall market and stabilize prices through arbitrage. Without HFTs the market would be far more volatile and hostile to small investors. But hey, they're all just a bunch of dirty capitalists who deserve to have their wealth seized, right?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @12:22PM (12 children)
LOL. HFTs do not benefit anyone who is not involved in HFTs. And the barriers to entry are so high that only a tiny percentage of market participants are in the HFT club.
HFTs are a scourge on the market and should be taxed per transaction if not outlawed completely.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday April 07 2019, @07:19PM (11 children)
That's the argument in a nutshell. We can apply it everywhere. Climate change mitigation doesn't benefit me. Widespread measles vaccination doesn't benefit me. Peace and prosperity in far away lands don't benefit me. If it doesn't benefit me, then why do it, right? But then there's the zero sum thinking. If someone is doing something that I'm not benefiting from, then it must be harming me instead.
Where's the evidence?
I think this is more of the same zero sum thinking. I now have to invent a reason why said activity needs to be banned/penalized.
My view on this is that HFT is almost purely a mutual consent activity like having sex. Sorry, Mom and Pop aren't getting robbed by microsecond traders or any of the other nonsense that is routinely attributed magically to HFT.
So we're in a democracy, right? And we're talking about voluntary activities that don't hurt anyone outside of the narrow little group (aside possibly from a slight cost to a few big traders who couldn't be bothered to make their trading HFT-proof). That means to me absolutely no reason to ban or penalize the activity.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday April 07 2019, @10:25PM (10 children)
You're full of shit. Climate change mitigation benefits you in a myriad of ways (keeping the food belts stable for example; do you really want the US to become unable to feed itself and Russia to be the world's breadbasket as Siberia thaws?). Widespread vaccination benefits you through herd immunity, and what happens if you suddenly become immunocompromised through, for example, an organ donation or HIV? Peace in far-off lands benefits you because the economy is now global, and the fewer knockon effects the better, as countries at war don't do much trading.
You're even worse than zero-sum: you're 100% selfish, and not even rational or far-sighted about it. People like you are a scourge when they become politicians, and I thank my lucky stars that you have no control over anything of more consequence than your own porn habits. You don't know shit, you don't know THAT you don't know shit, and the permanent case of Dunning-Krugeritis that comes with it makes you inflict yourself on all and sundry around you, necessitating people like me to do the memetic decontamination for anyone caught in the blast radius.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday April 07 2019, @11:08PM (9 children)
Climate change doesn't destabilize such things very quickly. It's like being concerned that people will drown from a normal tide. If we couldn't adapt on the fly to such things, there would be thousands of drownings every day from people who couldn't figure out that they needed to move a little towards the shore to keep their head above water. But the thing is, we already adapt to a lot of stuff without explicitly realizing it.
Finally, it's absurd to claim that the US will be unable to feed itself from slight climate change. We already grow a ridiculous multiple of excess food and would have generations to adapt to climate change.
Suppose I had measles recently? Don't need herd immunity then. Point is, you can always find someone who doesn't benefit from immunizations.
Hypothetically, I might actually lose my job because of that peace. I work doing no skill widgets. Now, country X resolved its civil war and can make those widgets cheaper. Bad for me. Point is that even actions with lots of social benefit, real or imagined, will have people who don't benefit from those actions for various reasons. Should we then ban or penalize them on the basis that they don't benefit everyone to the last person?
Sorry, you got it wrong again. And recall, if you can, that I was criticizing an AC whose only concrete complaint was that a small number of people benefited from HFT. I wasn't the one being selfish here.
I can't help but notice how utterly irrelevant your post is, even if you can't.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday April 08 2019, @12:59AM (8 children)
You truly do not understand how interconnected everything is. That's fine; things move nice and slow until suddenly they don't anymore. You'll find out. And when you do, you will envy the dead, who by that point I sincerely hope will include me. Ignorance must truly be bliss...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Monday April 08 2019, @02:28AM (7 children)
Sorry things aren't that interconnected.
Will your feelz push things over the tipping point? Because nobody, including you, has shown that there is a fast mode to climate change. In fact, what I keep hearing from the hype is that climate is changing faster than anyone has seen before. So it's already at its fastest, allegedly, and that's at least an order of magnitude slower than anything that would strain society's resources in the developed world, which let us note is expanding due in large part to productive use of fossil fuels.
OR my society will adapt to these slight changes, possibly without even noticing that they happened.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday April 08 2019, @02:39AM (6 children)
Idiot. The change itself isn't what I'm talking about; it's the systems that depend on certain parameters staying within a certain range. You don't know what the hell you're talking about, as usual. I'm not even going to bother explaining to you how buffer solutions work and how this relates to the ocean's acidity; it'd be pearls before swine. Shut up and piss off.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Monday April 08 2019, @06:00PM (2 children)
Ok, what makes you think that observation is relevant? You ever going to bring out any evidence? I'll note that no one has shown that 1.5 C above beginning of Industrial Age, for a glaring example of the hysteria present here, is necessary to our range, much less that of ecosystems we rely on. But it's a real convenient threshold for demanding that we do something now.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 09 2019, @01:22AM (1 child)
Here's an easy one: with a few degrees Celsius change, all that methane under Siberia and Alaska and trapped in clathrates in the oceans is going to fart itself back into the atmosphere, and then you'll see some *real* thermal fireworks. Methane is way the hell worse than CO2 for trapping IR-spectrum radiation. It would only take a small amount of actual warming to set that off; this is one of those knock-on effects I was talking about.
Imagine what happens if the US Midwest becomes an arid desert and Russia suddenly gets, in the form of Siberia, the world's largest stretch of arable land. Do you really want to live in that geopolitical reality? And that's to say nothing of what happens when just about everywhere within 20 degrees of the equator becomes literally unsurvivable in the summer; think of the massive migrations to the north.
You foolishly focus only on the single, simple fact of rising temperatures, and don't think about how fragile and interconnected and multilayered our civilization is. This is why I say you not only do not argue in good faith on this matter, but *cannot.* You lack the capacity, the intellectual honesty, the imagination, or some combination of the above to take in the real scope of the problem. Your posts on the subject have a signal to noise ratio just slightly under that of a long, wet beer fart.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @01:59AM
How many such degrees? I notice that most of that sort of research ignores the water that's been thrown on the ocean deposits. Higher pressure means higher temperature required till something happens.
I can imagine all kinds of things. But what's actually going to happen? Maybe we should start thinking about that instead.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday April 08 2019, @06:02PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 09 2019, @01:18AM (1 child)
Fuck me sideways with a sandblaster, you actually said "let all the brown people die of starvation, disease, and heatstroke" in code and thought we'd all be too dumb to pick up on the meaning behind your dogwhistling. What is it with you fucking nutbars and your persistent delusions of being the smartest people in the room? Do you really think we can't hear your real feelings loud and clear?
You know, the mitigations don't have to lead to overpopulation. Nothing slows down the fertility rate like a rising standard of living, haven't you noticed? When people aren't having 10 kids because 7 will die of malaria or yellow fever, guess what: overpopulation stops being an issue.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @01:57AM
Sorry, you just placed yourself well below that threshold of stupidity.
I never had that delusion. Sounds like you'd have more luck thinking than being defensive here. You're amazingly wrong.
Indeed. They could come up with mitigation that actually mitigates, for starters. But when one looks at the actual mitigation proposals one sees a remarkable lack of interest in outcome. It doesn't matter that Germany or Denmark double the cost of their electricity while doing nothing to reduce their carbon footprint. It doesn't matter that everyone is funding renewable energy projects guaranteed to go nowhere. The huge drawbacks to unreliable energy sources or their high cost don't matter. In other words, there's a group of people who have this idea about what is right, and they're willing to drive the rest of the world into poverty to get it, even if their efforts don't actually do anything about climate change in the process. Poverty is what will generate the overpopulation problem.
Practice what you preach.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday April 07 2019, @11:56AM
That's a very old idea: The Brits have been doing that since the 1600's, and the US did it for a few decades in the early 20th century thanks to FDR. In both cases, it worked more-or-less as predicted.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 07 2019, @07:00PM (7 children)
Or we could not do that. No one has ever come up with how HFT is supposed to be bad for the US economy. It's not magic, somehow detecting your trades before you make them. It's not crashing markets all the time. And the number of zeros in trade volume are completely irrelevant to anyone outside of a few traders in the stock market. That's why HFT whining fell off the radar a few years back.
Further, taxing stuff because someone doesn't like it is a terrible idea. If you strain yourself, Azuma, you might be able to think of something you do on occasion that someone else would love to tax. I would start with your homosexual inclinations and go from there. "Gay people are harmful for the US economy with their hard work, out-there creativity, and corrupting the youth of America. We need to tax 'em!!!"
My view is that the gear developed for HFT and the trade strategies developed by themselves more than make up for any harm HFT is supposedly causing to the US economy.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday April 07 2019, @10:06PM (6 children)
Your view is full of shit, as your head is lodged permanently somewhere between your duodenum and your sigmoid colon. Fuck off, you worthless bootlicker. You are not elite and you never will be, and if the elite even noticed your disgusting fawning over them, they wouldn't thank you for it; they'd laugh in your face and call you the sucker you are.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Sunday April 07 2019, @10:17PM (5 children)
I don't face ignorance for the benefit of some elite. I'm not interested in such games. I've corrected you before and you've ignored that correction before.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday April 07 2019, @10:27PM (4 children)
Sorry, what? I can't hear you with all the slobber and shoe polish dripping off the end of your tongue. Sounds like you're in denial of what we can all see you actively doing...? Odd.
Also, for your future benefit: an ad hominem is when someone substitutes insults for arguments. I am *supplementing* my arguments with insults; therefore, I am not committing an ad hom, just being a Nasty Woman (TM) as usual.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @12:44AM (3 children)
Let's fix your ignorance here. An ad hominem is when someone uses an irrelevant quality or description of a person as a way to refute their arguments.
The problem is you don't have anything substantial to go with those insults.
I find it telling that you feel the need to correct me on my imaginary accusations of ad hominems even though no one has accused anyone of ad hominems in the entire discussion! This is an example of a red herring [wikipedia.org], introducing something irrelevant to distract from the topic at hand.
Let's face it, you're just a complete fuck up when it comes to reason or logic. It's clear that you could be otherwise - sometimes you get it and those posts are great, but well, horses and water.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @12:45AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 09 2019, @01:13AM (1 child)
Oh no, don't misunderstand; your arguments are wrong because history has shown them to be. You are a bootlicking traitor *on top* of being wrong. That doesn't make you any more wrong, it just makes you that much more contemptible and pathetic.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:00AM
The same pattern of bullshit as always. Funny how you can never ever specify an actual example of this alleged behavior.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday April 07 2019, @08:34PM (3 children)
+10000 to this...not so much to make tax revenue as to make the practice vanish like the fucking cancer it is. To make matters worse, the companies doing it pay for faster network access to the data, which is for all practical purposes, legalized insider trading ffs. There is NOTHING good about this one, and the last I heard, it made up something like 75% of all the trades that occur.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @09:46PM (2 children)
Just to recap: HFT is when you place an order to buy a stock, they receive your order and in the time between ordering and buying they buy the same stock (lower than your price, if they can) and sell it to you (higher if they can). If they can't make this work, they cancel their order and fulfill your order on the open market.
It's pure, out-and-out creaming off profit at your expense.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by arslan on Sunday April 07 2019, @10:59PM (1 child)
You know they call it front-running in the a lot of non-HFT places and is a regulated offense, yet somehow I've also been curious why HFT folks have no such limitations.
Some folks claims it provides liquidity, but will it? In a market downturn where everyone is holding on to cash, will it provide liquidity if it has no traffic volume to leech off of? It can certainly boost liquidity when there's flow but in on itself I don't think it actually provides 1st order liquidity.
(Score: 3, Informative) by toddestan on Monday April 08 2019, @03:59AM
The HFT firms only make a move when they have both a buyer and a seller lined up and it's advantageous to them to act as a middle man. They don't hold onto any stock long term, just long enough for them to complete the transaction which can be as fast as a fraction of a second. As such they provide absolutely zero liquidity, as they simply won't act at all if there isn't already a buyer and a seller.
They provide the illusion of providing liquidity as they do many transactions, both as a buyer and seller. But that illusion can go poof in an instant.