Not long after I posted “Making Wall Street Pay“, in which I proposed raising the SEC fee for buying and selling stocks as a way to raise revenues and reduce market volatility, the New York Times discovered my idea and added its substantial heft to it.  Unfortunately for 99-percenters, the Obama administration (by administration I mean Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner) doesn’t care for my idea, according to The Times:

The Obama administration has also been lukewarm, expressing sympathy but saying it would be hard to execute, could drive trading overseas and would hurt pension funds and individual investors in addition to banks.

Oh, it would hurt investors in addition to banks?  Your everyday individual investor (and here I mean investor rather than speculator) would only pay a few extra cents on a trade.  If we were really concerned about the impact of the fee on Mr. or Ms. Ordinary Investor, we could exempt small trades (under $10,000 say) from the new fee.  Clearly, the Obama administration continues to act in a fashion consistent with protecting the very institutions (and the people running them) that brought our country to the brink of economic collapse.

It’s too bad that the Occupy Movement has not (yet) become the progressive alternative to the Tea Party, instead of the rag-tag assemblage of causes and resentments it is today.  There is certainly plenty worthy of protest — no tent required, only a sense of focus.