Forum Post: Demand a Financial Transaction Tax (Tobin Tax)

Please check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax From small to even big instutional investors they will not even realise the tax. The cost of the tax becomes significant for typical speculative traders, like daytraders, arbitrage traders etc. Only when trading 1000′s of trades a day and really high amounts.

For the regular people no problem at all. The tobin tax will encourage a more responsible model of investing, which is investing in companies you actually have researched and trust in. High frequency trading, algo trading generally arbitrage trading, high volume hedge fund style derivative tradings going will be penalised. This is great because the true costs of these trades are currently not priced in.

If you hear people saying Tobin Tax doesn't work if not introduced globally: The EU is already discussing it. Many states already attempted to introduce one, but failed because of the lack of wider participation of other countries. You can accomodate tobin taxes with other regulations that punish companies that move their headquarter but still want to trade at the NYSE.