EU Considers Taxing SMS Messages, Email

An anonymous reader writes to mention a Reuters article about a proposed EU tax on email and phone messages. From the article: "In Italy, the concept of a tax on texting was floated in the past, as a way to help offset the country's huge deficit, although it was flatly rejected by the outgoing government. But Lamassoure argues that with billions of emails and texts sent around the world, it's a novel and simple way to raise funds from new technology. 'Exchanges between countries have ballooned, so everyone would understand that the money to finance the EU should come from the benefits engendered by the EU,' he said."

Comments

disingenuous, and shows government stupidity

[yagu]

Under the aegis of "..., This is peanuts, but given the billions of transactions every day, this could still raise an immense income," he said....,

So, government when faced with a need for money (how often does that happen?) sees that billions of e-mails and text messages are being sent and infers they can and should extract a tiny morsel of blood from their constituents, concluding, "it's only a tiny bit". This is insane.

Better served and directed would be transparency by the government: "This is how much money we need, and this is what it will cost each taxpayer..." At least then the people get a more honest appraisal of what government is doing.

Foisting micro-taxes and micro-debits is also an additional unnecessary burden upon the billing mechanism for an already too complex system of charges.

If this were proposed in the United States, it would be almost singularly enough of a reason to cast my vote against any representative who supported such a scheme.