Occupy Wall Street Comes to Bayside

They’ve overrun , and now they’re coming to the bridge of .

Members of MoveOn.org are staging an “Occupy Bayside” rally during the Thursday morning commute. They will be demanding a tax on market speculators.

"A tiny 0.25% tax on stock trades, and 0.02% on futures, options, and credit default swaps, will raise $100 billion per year in revenue, and help stop some of the more outrageous speculative practices, "says , also a Patch Contributor.

The group believes the tax will create jobs, stabilize financial markets, and cut the national debt without raising middle class taxes. The protest is 

Here’s more from the press release:

Speculators use superfast computers to illegally manipulate prices, purposely mislead other investors, and gain unfair advantages over slower individual investors -- and even pension funds. Often they issue thousands of trades and then immediately cancel them.

One trader, using complex software, crashed the Dow by 1000 points in just minutes on May 6, 2011. Superfast trading accounts for 70% of trades in some markets.

A Financial Speculation Tax would make speculation less profitable and encourage Wall Street to make real investments that create jobs and real (not paper) economic activity.

Dangerous, market-crashing derivatives, because they involve many transactions, would be taxed many times over. This could help stabilize the markets.

If there had been a Financial Speculation Tax on AIG's shenanigans, it would have yielded enough to pay 20,000 elementary school teachers for a year.

A tiny 0.25% tax on securities would have yielded $7 million a minute during the May 6, 2011 flash crash.

Polls show 80% of Americans favor a U.S. Financial Speculation Tax, which could:

• Raise revenue, create jobs, and cut the deficit -- without raising taxes on the middle class.
• Make Wall Street speculators pay their fair share.
• Stabilize markets by discouraging super-fast trading and the most dangerous speculative practices.

"We're asking our neighbors here in Northeast Queens to support passage of Let Wall St. Pay for the Restoration of Main Street Act, H.R. 419 (DeFazio), Senate 2927 (Harkin). These bills, when passed, would raise $100 billion per year in revenue by taxing speculative traders. Half of the proceeds would go for rebuilding our infrastructure, and the other half would be used for deficit reduction."

"Only the top 1% will pay this tax. The first $100,000 of trades each year, as well as mutual funds, pensions, and IRAs would be exempt," Yale said.