I like your going with this. My boss when I was employed by a market maker started screaming about price distortions one day when he was really talking about the computer monitor being dirty or something.. I said a price distortion is when government intervenes and he got mad cause I was right. It would be a big wrench in the machine but might be some opportunity as well. I did master the skills of dynamic programming and optimal control so maybe I could design another strategy
Tommy, I would have to move to a non-US country that still operates true double auction markets to survive
We're working under a hypothetical exclusion to low and mid income earners. Highly unlikely as big businesses have always sued and won when similar sector exemptions were made for small players. It also beckons one to think how volume & price would be affected if gov. killed corporate hft.
To the contrary, a large portion of the tax system in the U.S. is progressive, starting with the income tax front and center! Not to mention a myriad of laws, incentives for bidding on govt contracts.....
There are a whole raft of taxes, most notably U.S. individual income tax and capital gains tax, that tax the first $X at a low to zero percentage, from $X to $Y at higher percentage, from $Y and up at still higher percentage, for example. We call that a progressive tax schedule. It's also what someone like Biden is most familiar with, so when you decode his statement it's most likely if he does this (which I think is highly unlikely) it would probably be progressive in much the same way. There are also a whole host of laws that only apply to companies with more than X employees, tax clauses that are only applicable to companies with revenues over $X, contracts that are only available to businesses with less than $X in revenue over the past 3 years to bid on, or those companies are given preference....basically the list of ways in which exemptions are carved out for the little guy are almost innumerable. So while I'm as cynical as the next guy that GS and the rest have an inordinate amount of influence in legislation, it's simply not accurate to say "big businesses have always sued and won when similar sector exemptions were made for small players." because that's just objectively not true across the economy. It's far more likely that the big business will just kill this outright.