Quote from Robert A. Green: the Fin Reg bill having FTT on swaps transactions .. Sent from my iPhone.
".. designed to
recover the costs .. related to the supervision and regulation of swaps markets"? [citation needed BTW]
Doesn't sound like a tax to me

It has a very specific purpose, severely restricting its size: merely recovering the costs of regulatory activities. Taxes on the other hand, would be for generic (deficit) spending, and thus could be set at unmitigated rates, motivated solely by greed (as in the Baker/de Fazio FTT rate). Having a specific purpose also guarantees that this new 'CFTC fee' (transactions-based, just as the current SEC fee) cannot be increased in the future to some unreasonable rate (e.g. the infamous 0.25%) , so the 'slippery slope' fears do not apply. It's just another non-destructive, reasonable (in comparison to any FTT) regulatory fee for the previously unregulated part of the financial markets.
Relax, yours is a democratic country, so when they say 'no', they don't mean it in the UK's sense (where 'no' has a bit more complex meaning: 'no to
new such taxes, but let's keep our great British national tradition which precedes even Tobin by a decade: the SDRT 'duty' on pensions and foreign residends'
Let's hear it from the source (keeping in mind that the Commodity Exchange Act regulates CFTC, not SEC):
"When you sell a stock, you may have noticed that a small transaction fee, often just a few pennies, appears on your confirmation slip. Although some broker-dealers have described this charge as an "SEC Fee," the SEC does not actually impose this fee on individual investors.
The SEC does not impose or set any of the brokerage fees that investors must pay. Instead, under Section 31 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, self-regulatory organizations (SROs) -- such as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and all of the national securities exchanges (including the New York Stock Exchange) -- must pay transaction fees to the SEC based on the volume of securities that are sold on their markets. These fees
recover the costs incurred by the government, including the SEC, for supervising and regulating the securities markets and securities professionals [and some visual erotic entertainment - the only perk in this exceedingly boring job

]." [source: "SEC Fee" â Section 31 Transaction Fees, URL:
http://www.sec.gov/answers/sec31.htm ]