Why don't you just boil it down to what it really is. You want me to be forced to pay for your healthcare. Stop dancing around the issue.

So are you volunteering your life to work on treatments that the rest of us can use for free? Sounds great. I will give you a high five.

There aren't enough people to means test off of social security to make a real dent. Don't worry we will be having universal coverage. Personally I don't believe that we will see any decrease in the cost of care. But say we did, using your numbers we would save $264B which is a nice chunk of change, but not hardly enough to arrest the growth in debt. No love for the robot cheetah? That little guy is awesome. I could not agree more about demobilizing troops, but come on lets cut some real money. Lets cut the F35. Defaulting on securities that certain non-Fed agencies hold. The fed should buy them for cash and then just retire them. I don't believe this is legal under current law but maybe Obama can just insist on it in the next shutdown. This would also give the government the ability to run infinitely large deficits which it will need to do. Of course the money may be worthless at some point but it should buy us a few years.

The whole point of the ACA is to create single payer and drive the insurance companies out of business.

They did pass a budget. It just didn't have funding for obamacare in it and now Harry Reid is holding a gun to the countries head in an entirely undemocratic move to fund the ACA. In other words he is a terrorist and the republicans shouldn't negotiate with terrorists.

I don't know what to laugh at first. We will mandate an expense and then... Call in 10 years.

Why would you eliminate dark pools? BTW Dark pools are regulated markets. NASDAQ and DE both require a certain trade/quote ratio to be met to be eligible for rebates. If you want to see a lot of orders look not at stocks but at OPRA. If you don't and HFT firm to take the other side of your trade there are plenty of options available to you, including sending a market order through Fidelity. It will be internalized those evil HFT firms will simply see a tape print via the TRF.

The largest HFT firms are not banks. Banks have largely spun off their HFT groups, like Process Driven Trading from Morgan Stanley. They are independent firms like RenTech, Getco, Citadel, Tradebot, etc... They are not really any different then the pit traders they replaced. Pit traders paid to be "co-located" at the exchange because they could trade with "lower latency". With RegNMS HFT firms provide a valuable service making sure that the price of a security is more or less the same price on all exchanges. Many firms (like Getco) have official market making responsibilities. HFT is not theft. There are abuses, like layering, which should absolutely be prosecuted. Market making has always been about speed and always will be regardless of what rules are passed.

If there is a "culprit" it is most likely AlphaFlash (http://www.alphaflash.com/). They offer the lowest latency access to economic numbers in NY4 in NYC and Aurora in Chicago. Or there was clock skew. Many clocks in the world don't run on PTP.

No they can't. If you had read the exchange specs you would know that Flash Orders were an optional feature to keep from getting routed out to the NBBO exchange. The person submitting the order had to opt in to have their order viewed. And in any case they no longer exist. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703409304576166930877474292.html

Level2 Market data does not disseminate all quotes. It disseminates the quotes from market makers and other exchanges. The full order book is a separate feed. If you submit a market order from a retail broker it will never see a stock exchange. It will be internalized and crossed with either other customer flow or by the broker directly. If not it will be sent to a market maker like Knight or Citadel. The same will happen to a marketable limit order. The only way you will ever see a stock exchange is if you post something that will be entered into the order book. And there is no way for someone to "jump" you in line. Orders are fulfilled at each price level in the order that they were entered.