>>>Here's a weird idea.
>>>How about thinking about the effects on the people involved?
>
>Here's an even weirder idea: I've been making these sorts of points on UT for a decade, often as a voice in the wilderness. Now I'm lectured on them by somebody whose generation oversaw the whole mess and benefited from it. ;-)
>
>>>Here's a thought, JR. Instead of focusing on the discord of the moment - re-read A Tale Of Two Cities and see what happened to the ruling classes who ignored the "extremists."
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>See above. ;-)
>
>Of course I'm aware that the US 1% won't budge willingly but if you try to impose draconian measures, they'll vanish and re-materialize with all their loot in Canary Islands or some other tax haven. The challenge for lawmakers is that it's better to secure 30% of a dollar than 90% of nothing. I don't have much truck for Ayn Rand but that part of her writing is perfectly accurate IMHO. Push out the drivers of production and you'll be left with bankers and other parasites trying to gouge $ out of an increasingly poor and desperate populace. So if you want selective tax, maybe tax nonproductive service industries hardest. E.g. a small currency conversion tax less than normal banking fees will hardly affect travelers heading for Cancun but will release $Bs from parasitic machine stimulation/shaving of momentary fx imbalances. There's no reason why society has to allow and reward parasitic behavior in exchange for nothing of value. As an example of the effects, NZ's daily fx trade exceeds the annual GDP as parasites shave fractions of every currency movement, or create pointless currency movements to try to stimulate a fake shift that can be harvested. NZers have to pay for bloated infrastructure and oversight of noncontributory activity and lets not forget that if every productive transaction gets shaved, the shaved $ comes at the expense of one side or the other. And every so often the parasites decide to control the currency or commodity at the expense of the citizenry, as Malaysia and even the UK has learned to their cost. Again, carving a fx tax would make it easier for states to defend themselves from rapacious behavior against the citizenry. It might also mitigate the citizenry's growing disgust at fawning adulation accorded by fellow 1%ers to people who bet against the common interest (e.g. in the subprime meltdown) to harvest $Bs at the expense of everybody else.

Juts been reading Yanis Varoufakis book Adults in the Room. That was his proposal to start collecting evaded tax. Start with a low percentage to allow people to normalise their position