The decades since 1975 have witnessed a breathtaking upward transfer of income and wealth in America from the bottom 90 percent of earners to the richest 1 percent. Over the past thirty-five years, meanwhile, the average Wall Street bonus has risen by a factor of more than 1200. As of April, roughly half of all households had lost income over the past year while the nation’s billionaires have nearly doubled their fortunes.

It’s a gobsmacking plunder of wealth in desperate need of an aggressive response, and an atrocious misallocation of resources that could otherwise be invested in health care, housing, education, and other social goods. In this spirit, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Barbara Lee last month reintroduced a modest and straightforwardly commonsensical idea: a new tax of a fraction of a percent on financial transactions like stock trades, bonds, and derivatives. Their bill, the Tax on Wall Street Speculation Act, enjoys strong support from a long list of grassroots and public-interest organizations and has the backing of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and at least ten House Democrats (a parallel bill, the Wall Street Tax Act, sponsored by Congressman Peter DeFazio and Senator Brian Schatz, is also currently sitting before Congress).

If implemented, it could raise as much as $2.4 trillion in new revenue over the next decade. As Beth Markman of Public Citizen points out, the majority of investors would barely be affected if even affected at all — the proposed financial transaction tax mostly impacting high-frequency traders, hedge funds, and day traders. A 2019 analysis of a 0.1 percent financial transaction tax (FTT) by Public Citizen, for example, projected that a typical middle-income family with a few investments might expect to pay about $13 a year.