Portugal Is Considering a "Terabyte Tax"

An anonymous reader writes "As a proposal to avoid becoming the 'next Greece', a Portuguese opposition party has proposed a tax on storage. The party claims that the tax will not effect the average citizen and is mostly levied at business users, but internal storage on mobile phones means a 64GB iPhone could be €32 more expensive. From the article: 'The proposal would have consumers paying an extra €0.2 per gigabyte in tax, almost €21 extra per terabyte of data on hard drives. Devices with storage capacities in excess of 1TB would pay an aggravated tax of 2.5 cents per GB. That means a 2TB device will in fact pile on €51.2 in taxes alone (2.5 cents times 2048GB). External drives or “multimedia drives” as the proposed bill calls them, in capacities greater than 1TB, can be taxed to the tune of 5 cents per gigabyte, so in theory, a 2TB drive would cost an additional €103.2 per unit (5 cents times 2048GB)."

Comments

Re:Regardless

[DigiShaman]

There are two sets of people, predominantly left vs right thinking on the issue of money.

Left - Believes the money was never yours to begin with. Ownership of it is limited and its value subjected to change. Not a bug, a feature. It's called inflation (a form of backdoor taxation). The government is allowed to spend because - again - it was never your money in the first place.

Right - Believes the value of the US federal fiat currency is only worth the private sector progress that it represents. If everyone stopped working tomorrow and forever, the value of the US dollar would be worthless. When the government taxes and spends excessively, the fruits of labor have been robbed from the people. This includes excessive military spending way beyond the threshold of diminishing returns.