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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)."
Before long, Spain will have its Gigabyte Tax
Italy will chime in with its own Megabyte Tax
And Greece? They'll have the honor of having the world's first Kilobyte Tax
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Perhaps that's the idea. This is a copyright-inspired effort, after all - and with the move to the cloud and it's inherent ease of central control, perhaps the thinking behind such high taxes is that ordinary people cannot be trusted with so much storage of their own. They might misuse it for piracy.
**OLD** This law draft was already discarted like 2 moths ago.
Doubling the price of a 2Tb external drive? You're going to have to pirate a *shitload* of stuff to make up for that.
Am I the only one that thinks that people might finally complain that they're paying tax on the extra 24 MB in every GB without getting them?
As far i know ( i live in Portugal ) other than this being old news, it was rejected by all other parties other than the one attempting to get this passed and was rather laughed about because of it here.
A tax that increases at an exponential rate, what more could a government hope for!
As I understand EU free-trade rules, as long as the appropriate taxes are paid in the country where goods are bought (inside the EU), the government cannot then levy additional taxes when imported, either directly (in the boot of a car) or when shipped.
So this just seems a great proposal to kill all domestic sales of electronic goods with drives in - iPads, smartphones, photocopiers, laptops - and relocate them to Spain instead. I'm sure the Spanish government wouldn't mind, but it doesn't like it's going to do much to help Portugese debt.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
It was not a proposal to avoid becoming 'the next Greece'. It was a proposal to "help" artists.
In reality it was just another levy (we have several) to benefit some corrupt goons on a local "rights" association. And as you might guess it, they don't help artists that much. Just their pockets.
It's old because the parliament shot it down after an active online campaign by internet activists and a couple of politicians with common sense.
... how do they expect this to work !? People will simply buy storage in other EU countries. But I doubt anyway that such a farce could ever pass.
That means a 2TB device will in fact pile on €51.2 in taxes alone (2.5 cents times 2048GB).
Since when do manufacturers of hard drives use Base 2 to describe the size of their hard drives?
They don't, so it should be 50 € (2.5 cent times 2000 GB).
I can understand that taxes might be aggravating, but was this summary written by a third grader? I'm pretty sure submitter meant aggregated (or more likely aggregate).
(He/she also meant affect.)
the government has considered taxing SMSs by 0.02€ each. (This is not a joke)
It's Verizon Math! €0.2 per GB would be €1 for every 5GB (€200 TB). Not that we ever check submissions here on /.
If you are going create an arbitrary tax on the size of something that affects an arbitrary section of the population why not create a penis size tax. It could be entirely self declared with no verification. The results should be made available on a public register, listed in order of length x girth. I'm sure that would raise a fortune.
No, a tax on idiotic laws. Every time someone proposes a law that will be nixed by the supreme/constitutional court because it violates other laws, tax the idiot who wasted valuable parliament time to get a moment in the limelight.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Something like this is already in Finland.
The rates in Finland are somewhat lower than those proposed for Portugal. Moreover, elsewhere on that site they say what consumers get in return: "Everyone is allowed to copy published works, such as music, movies, television and radio broadcasts for their own private use in Finland."
It is also quite clear that the compensation allows copying of movies and music on disks borrowed from libraries and suchlike. No doubt, the RIAA and MPAA would be a little queasy at such provisions in larger markets.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
As long as they are still forced to buy war material from Germany and other EU countries instead of using that money to consolidate, I see little hope for Greece.
The whole "bailout fund" scam is nothing but a bailout for EU companies that sold crap to Greece and would now have to realize a loss.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
See the efficacy of taxes is where you gouge something that most people can't or don't want to do without like gasoline, alcohol, tobacco. Cell phones are ubiquitous to the point where even the UN considers them a basic human right. So naturally the plan must be to gouge and gouge and gouge some more. Double, triple, quadruple the cost of handsets and data transmission.
It's €0.02 per GB, not €0.2. Article and summary both get that wrong.
Yep. Pretty much the entire western world has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Yet the politicians and policy makers consistently get it backwards.
It's the kind of magical thinking that caused Kagan to say "It's just a pile of federal money", apparently not realizing that it all comes from taxes on you.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
No, a tax on idiotic laws. Every time someone proposes a law that will be nixed by the supreme/constitutional court because it violates other laws, tax the idiot who wasted valuable parliament time to get a moment in the limelight.
Hell with that. I want a "three strikes and you're a despot" law. If you voted "Aye" to violate my constitutional rights with some stupid law, and the supreme court overturns that legislation, and you've done this three times, you are guilty of being a serial tyrant and should be sentenced to not less than 10 years in a federal prison. That applies to everyone who voted for the law, not just the guy who signs it (although it could certainly start with him, as he took an oath to defend the Constitution when he entered office.)
No statute of limitations, either. You could be sleeping in your bed 10 years after leaving office, and if the Supreme Court overturns your 15-year-old crappy law, the ninjas bash down your door, haul you out of the arms of your mistress, and drag your butt to jail. None of these last minute help-my-buddy-in-the-industry-laws like pardons happening on the last days of office.
Congressional sessions would be over pretty damn quick, don't you think? Some idiot puts up a law written by lobbyists for the industry, and every other person in congress would immediately say "Um, I vote NO, right now. Who wants to go get a drink with me?"
John
You should. Printing money depreciates currency, and on a country highly dependent on energy imports and raw materials such as Portugal, the result would be a massive increase on the cost of energy, transport and production. Yes, even worse than now (I'm also portuguese).
If we had a supreme court which weren't a bunch of right wing nut jobs you might have a point, but I'd like my elected officials to go against the wishes of the douche bags who gave us the Citizens United decision.
Then please enlighten us as to how the Left views money.
but it is much easier to fix the structural flaws in a growing economy vice an economy in an austerity death spiral.
One of the structural flaws being that there's not enough political will to address them until the economy falls into the above trap. As I see it, repeatedly and routinely getting into the above situation is worse than a rare bout of "austerity death spiral" which is combined with credible structural reform.
Yes. That is a spending problem. No one planned for the likelihood that revenues might decrease and that we could have a "lean year". This is a basic fundemental problem that humans have been dealing with since the beginning of civilization.
You save up for a rainy day.
Yes. Having no rainy day fund is a spending problem.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Not sure if you're trolling or just clueless about money. But I'll bite. Oddly enough you're wrong about both sides, so at least you don't have an agenda (that I can see).
All money value is theoretical, which what bugs me most about Ron Paul and the neo-goldbugs. Even gold has no value other than what we give it. We had to pick something of value, and gold just matched the characteristics best scarce but not too scarce, easily workable by ancients (smelts in the hundreds, not thousands of degrees), doesn't oxidize, etc.
BTW: Fractional Reserve banking was not created by bankers or the Left or the Right, but by goldsmiths in Britain who realized that when they started to create these notes that drew on gold deposits, they could create more than the deposits on hand. As long as things were stable and a small subset of people ever asked for their gold at any given time (we'd call this a bank run today).
Ownership of money is not limited - it can be created or destroyed as needed. Witness what the Fed had done during the Great Recession, creating dollars out of thin air. Why do they have value? Because we think they do.
The fruits of labor? The right is more about investment and solidity of value than worrying about labor. They worry more about capital markets, which would be hurt if inflation is high.
Governments tolerate light inflation for a few reasons. Mostly because it changes people's timelines for investment to the present not the future. I'll buy something now if i know it will be more expensive tomorrow.
Heavy inflation discourages investment - if I know the money i will get for this product 3 months in the future is less than the value of the investment now, I will not make that investment.
Deflation is even worse, it sets up a vicious cycle of no investment and layoffs. That's why we tolerate low inflation rather than zero inflation - don't want to be even close to dipping into deflation.
Please, go listen to old episodes of Planet Money, they're very informative.