@mcamelyne

 "you want to take away people's money to prevent them from gambling."

 It's not about taking peoples money away, it's about social responsibility. If you want to make money in this country, you are directly tied to it's well being. Also, whether you're speculating or investing, you're still gambling with that money. I don't want to stop people from gambling, I want to discourage excessive and unnecessary risk and encourage investment.

"Instead, you are really just jealous." 

 Lol, this is just cheap. Speculation doesn't create value in the economy, I don't believe people should be able to create massive fortunes without adding value to an economy. That's the very foundation of Capitalism. Excessive speculation simply fuels bubbles and creates market panics when firms screw up.

 "People that gamble(speculate) have an illness.  Whether you take their money or not, they will still gamble(lucrative speculation)."

 I don't have a problem with Speculation in and of itself, it's a useful tool to hedge the market. I don't think it should be stopped all together, my goal would be to discourage excessive speculation.

"Our current tax rates are not ridiculously low." 

Yes, they are.  When you're taxed less for massive earnings made by speculation than you would be actually producing something, there's something wrong with our tax policy.

"You have to look at the share of taxes to GDP. Historically it has been about the same as today." 

 You also have to look at individual income tax brackets and how they're made up. Because of tax policy over the past few decades the top income brackets have seen huge increases in income which they're more likely to save. This takes spending power away from the middle class and fuels excessive speculation.It also encourages the middle class to take on dept as a means of increasing their spending power.

"Higher taxes only equals higher revenues during the first year"

Simply not true. 

 "after that the rich adjust their investments to avoid taxes.  You can watch their money fly offshore into tax havens."

Tax havens only work as a loophole. Attempts to close those loopholes are often met by Republicans crying "job killing tax increase." 

  "Would you rather have the rich people move their money offshore and have the economic crisis deepen or keep it onshore and encourage them to invest it in job creating activities."

Setting up offshore accounts doesn't make you immune to US taxes. And simply because you move money to offshore accounts doesn't mean it's suddenly never able to come back into the US.

  "That is intelligent fiscal policy."

You haven't made any suggestions.

  "I am not saying you can't raise taxes a little, but you're acting like a child who sees a big piggy bank and wants it for himself.  It's a mirage."

 Excuse me? I never said we needed to crank the tax rates up to 11. I said they're ridiculously low and need raising. Fact is, big business isn't going to run off to Somalia every time you raise taxes in the US. Our economy is simply to big and even in this climate has huge amounts of spending power comparative to other countries. Raising certain tax rates like carried interest, just to throw one out at random,  is necessary SOMETIMES. And this would be one of those times. There's nothing childish about that.

 "The only thing that should be increased are corporate taxes for companies that offshore."

I agree. But it's not the ONLY thing that could or should be done. 

Except that no one is proposing "Draconian" tax increases that you claim "everybody wants". We don't need to go back to the days of 70-90% but we need to get it back to 50% or more... You know, like back in the days when we could balance the budget.

I mean god DAMN look at that GDP/Debt stat. That's ROUGH.

We were fucking gravy train until Reagan came and fucked it all up.

"Terrorism is the war for the poor and powerless. War is the terrorism for the rich and powerful."