, Columnist
The Case for a Financial Transaction Tax
Governments charge user fees for parks, roads and other infrastructure. Why not do the same for the financial system?
You use it, you pay.
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It’s a good conservative principle that where possible, the government should recover the cost of its services from the people who use them, rather than from taxpayers at large. It’s also pretty uncontroversial that the government must oversee financial markets, to ensure that they are free and fair.
It thus makes sense that the government should charge a user fee for financial transactions. So why has the idea -- as proposed by various politicians, including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Senator Brian Schatz and Representative Peter DeFazio -- encountered so much opposition?