Quote from Rabbitone:
HFT is near and dear to our government. Here is why it isâ¦
In the early 1990s I was a bank DBA managing a large set of databases that included payroll. Early one morning I received a high priority Email that asked me to immediately attend a meeting with other bank managers. I gulped my coffee and ran to the meeting room. Once inside this hush-hush meeting a man stood up flashing his badge and said ââ¦Iâm with the local FBI here to investigate major theftâ¦â Well that raised the hair on the back of my neck.
At that meeting we learned that a national firm we had contracted to do our payroll computation services had a programmer who conspired with one of our bank manager to skim off our payrolls. What the programmer had done is computed all of the paychecks to a fraction of a penny for totals but rounded each paycheck to the lower penny for payment. The fraction of the penny multiplied times all the people the bank employed times all of the paychecks per year added up to millions that went into an account one of our managers started. It seems the programmer and the bank manager had split millions of dollars over the years from that account.
In the end both the bank manager and the programmer had been caught by a computer payroll programming malfunction. It happened while investigating a failure of a miss-processed payroll that an auditor had discovered this secret account and the jig was up. But the lessons of this were never lost on me.
Donât think for a minute that government doesnât know what is going on with HFT - they are drooling over it. Some time soon our government will make a huge discovery that ââ¦look what these horrible HFTs are doingâ¦â and soon after collect a big percentage tax on every transaction â⦠to punish themâ¦â The bottom line is our government endorsees and facilitates innovations like HFT processing since it facilitates hidden tax revenue.
Incidents like the payroll one above taught our government that direct taxation is the wrong business to be in. They learned it is far more profitable for government to allow its citizens to be raped in micro percentages multiple times than to attempt to collect direct taxes. In the future there will be more and more âmicroâ taxes that we will rarely see but will shift a big part of the GDP to the government.
Want more examples. Just look at Obamacares tax on medical devices coming in 2013. There are more than 2900 of them. Included in this list are items both ubiquitous and arcane, but they all will cost us more to fund Obamacare. Some examples:
⢠Dentures, both partial and full (Class VI)
⢠Fetal cell-screening kit (Class IV)
⢠Female condoms, single use (Class III)
⢠Treponemal syphilis test (Class IV)
⢠HIV saliva test kit (Class IV)
⢠Patient data storage and transmission software (Class VI)
⢠Stair-climbing wheelchair (Class III)
⢠Inflatable penis prosthetic (Class III)
⢠Hip, knee, ankle, breast prosthetics (Class III)
⢠Soft contact lenses, extended wear (Class III)
⢠IUDs (Class III)
⢠Dialysis catheters (Class III)
⢠Dental X-rays (Class II)
⢠Sickle-cell anemia tests (Class II)
⢠Mammograms (Class II)
This is just the beginning of the VAT the democrats will push down our throats.
