Portugal Is Considering a "Terabyte Tax" 353
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)."
Re:Dear Portugal (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Depends... (Score:5, Interesting)
Something like this is already in Finland [hyvitysmaksu.fi].
The rates in Finland are somewhat lower than those proposed for Portugal. Moreover, elsewhere on that site [hyvitysmaksu.fi] 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 [hyvitysmaksu.fi] 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.
Re:Just one more tax... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Regardless (Score:5, Interesting)
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.