Member-only story
The Micro-Cent Tax — Part IV
Every now and then, like the proverbial broken clock that is right twice a day, some thing happens in Washington that is good for New Jersey. Senator Bernie Sanders just proposed a 50 cents per share tax on stock transactions (with a lesser tax on bond and derivative transactions) as a way to pay for free college tuition and student debt forgiveness.
Last summer, I proposed a .25 cents per share tax (which I called the Micro-Cent Tax) on stock transactions in New Jersey (leaving bonds and derivatives untaxed), which is home to the servers that process billions of stock transfers every day. I predicted that Wall Street would beg New Jersey to impose the state-level tax if New Jersey’s Senators and Congressmen would oppose a federal tax that would likely be larger than what New Jersey would impose.
New Jersey desperately needs the revenue. We are at least $190+billion in the hole for pensions and future health care costs and we can hardly afford to pay more taxes. We’re already one of the highest tax jurisdictions in the country with the second highest amount of debt on our books.
And, an alliance (revenue share) with New York would give us potentially four Democratic Senators and twenty-nine Democratic Congressmen and Congresswoman to preserve our exclusive tax on this activity. New Jersey and New York have been nurturing Wall Street for more than a century. It’s time to pay us back. Please Governor Murphy. Stand up for us!
