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David Dees at deesillustration.com

Dean Baker has been writing for years that we should be shifting the tax burden from American workers' wages to unproductive enterprises like short term trading.  See Dean Baker's "Taxing Financial Speculation: Shifting the Tax Burden from Wages to Wagers". 
Ellen Hodgson Brown quotes Baker in her great book "Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System And How We Can Break Free".

Insofar as possible, taxes should be shifted away from productive activity and onto unproductive activity. In recognition of this basic economic principle, the government (mostly state and local governments) already taxes most forms of gambling quite heavily. For example, gambling on horse races is taxed at between 3.0 and 10.0 percent (www.toba.org/crossref.html). Casino gambling in the states where it is allowed is taxed at rates between 6.25 and 20.0 percent (www.americangaming.org/Media/Impact/taxpaymnt.html). State lotteries are taxed at a rate of close to 40 percent (1998 U.S. Statistical Abstract).[1] Stock market trading is the only form of gambling that largely escapes taxation. This is doubly inefficient. The government has no reason to favor one form of gambling over others, and it is far better economically to tax unproductive activities than productive ones.

  Buy her book and check out her website: Tax the Traders

The fact that Wall Street’s speculative trades remain untaxed suggests a tidy way taxpayers could recover some of their billions in bailout money. The idea of taxing speculative trades was first proposed by Nobel Prize winning economist James Tobin in the 1970s. But he acknowledged that the tax was unlikely to be implemented, because of the massive accounting problems involved. Today, however, modern technology has caught up to the challenge, and proposals for a “Tobin tax” are gaining traction. The proposals are very modest, ranging from .005% to 1% per trade, far less than you would pay in sales tax on a pair of shoes. For ordinary investors, who buy and sell stock only occasionally, the tax would hardly be felt. But high-speed speculative trades could be slowed up considerably. Wall Street traders compete to design trading programs that can move many shares in microseconds, allowing them to beat ordinary investors to the “buy” button and to manipulate markets for private gain.

So Goldman Sachs has a program that  can beat ordinary investors to the punch and they pay very little to do it whereas ordinary people pay sales tax for just about everything they need.  But these traders are not producing anything ordinary people need and pay nothing.  You see that's the crux.  Brown points out:

 As one blogger mused:

“Why do we have a financial system? I mean, much of its activity looks an awful lot like gambling, and gambling is not exactly a constructive endeavor. In fact, many people would call gambling destructive, which is why it is generally illegal. . . .

“What makes Goldman Sachs et. al. so evil is that they offer vast wealth to our society’s best and brightest in exchange for spending their lives being non-productive. I want our geniuses to be proving theorems and curing cancer and developing fusion reactors, not designing algorithms to flip billions of shares in microseconds.”

Stop encouraging an addiction, she says.  By taxing them like other gambling venues, we can start to  shift taxing away from work that is productive.  You know, work that grows things, or raises things, or makes things.    There are so many other ways to pay for things than an income i.e workers tax, I'm discovering.  I used to be a believer in the "progressive income tax", but I've seen it turn into a way of taxing work over wealth in a corrupt crony capitalist system.  It has bankrupted us.  We need to look at new ideas or old ideas that have been hidden away for a long time.

    

 

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