Robin Hood tax: what the Republicans tried to censor....

I'm tempted to say that if the USAmerican Republican in the 90's engineered effectively to censor the idea, then it's an idea worth knowing about. Of course it's now being taken seriously.
What’s not to like? | Inside Story: "Republican senators in the United States had started misrepresenting Tobin’s proposal as a “UN tax.” This was nonsense, of course: taxes can only be collected by governments. Yet that fact didn’t prevent the Republican-controlled Senate from including in the bill authorising payment of US dues to the United Nations a clause prohibiting payment if Tobin’s idea was even discussed in the UN."
The article this quote's from gives some helpful details and summaries of research related to the tax. Here's the summarising final paragraph.

American Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman argues that a financial transaction tax “would be a trivial expense for people engaged in foreign trade or long term investment; but it would be a major disincentive for people trying to make a fast buck (or euro, or yen) by outguessing the markets over the course of a few days or weeks.” “What’s not to like?” he asks. Critics claim that it would be avoided, but the centralisation of such transactions makes them relatively easy to monitor – if there is a will to do so. The tax is one way of shrinking bloated financial sectors and of raising revenue from those who have benefited most from the explosive growth in the volume of international financial transactions. •