I'm just bitching....
Just like if you buy something from the store and then return it you get all of your money back even if you actually used the item.
This is what all the recent articles are about. It passed 11 against 10 out of 577 potential votes. The chances this makes it into the actual budget are quite slim and it would be insane if it happened.
This just points out how incredibly incompetent everyone involved is about technical matters (I will refrain from making comments about their competency in other fields but I'm afraid that this is not a great sign).
With the state of French politics lately, it's very unlikely any budget will be passed any time soon. My take is the proposal is a stunt aimed at generating some attention.
I feel like torrenting is tax evasion now as well in France.
Welcome to EU!
Stop wasting your time on that, it’s going to get removed next time.
I understand that it’s way easier and quicker to do the latter instead of saving.
That’s the reason they do it in the first place.
I just wonder if there is a way to incentivize them to save instead. Maybe some country was successful at one point in time.
???
"I'll lower/won't raise your taxes" is politics 101. The bigger issue is how you prevent politicians from promising goodies and/or lower taxes, funding them both by borrowing.
I am talking about what they actually do after they got elected.
Here's my thinking:
1. Limit who is charged based on how much bandwidth they consume / month. If it's over 1TB, the tax goes into affect. This helps small businesses.
2. If (1) can't work, we can do it based on income from French users above X / month.
3. Tax income must go towards infrastructure projects: Parks & Recs, Fiber buildouts, etc.
A modest download tax of USD $2.07 per GB suffices.
Estimate:
- 134 million households
- approx 80% of households subscribe to home broadband
- approx 750 GB download per month per household
- $2 trillion annual deficit
- assumes no change in household behaviour in response to the new taxLol, my behavior would change a lot if I was paying $2 per gig, my god
While the solution might not be optimal, how valid is the underlying problem? Can someone make genuine steelman arguments?
So Netflix pays max 15% of streaming revenue in France. If you and I start a streaming service only in France, we pay a max 2% of streaming revenue in France (because that's the only place where we stream). So there's potentially a protectionist element. But note that you and I could do our France-only service from anywhere and still be capped at 2%, according to the law as I understand it (not a lawyer).
> « La taxe sur les producteurs de données numériques fait l’objet d’un plafonnement correspondant au maximum à 15 % du chiffre d’affaires réalisé en France par l’émetteur ou à 2 % de son chiffre d’affaires total. [1]
"The tax on digital service producers has a ceiling that corresponds to a maximum of 15% of France-based revenue by the transmitter or 2% of its total revenue (my translation)."
[1] https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...
Putting that aside, I'd be interested in how they'd want to measure this when in practice network traffic is delivered over all kinds of CDNs and rented servers from who knows where. The technicalities of determining who would have to pay seem very non-trivial to me.
No justification, like gasoline tax, which is used to fix the roads and fund green technology. Or tax on stock buybacks which have questionable value in society. Or carbon tax.
Just see something people do and tax it.
I suspect he suggested 3% because of the yearly GDP growth at the time, but I say make it 0%. Politicians shouldn't have the authority of indebting future generations.
That’s also indebting future generations, it just doesn’t show in the deficit.
Not to mention without state‘s debt a lot of people lose interest rates on their savings.
What makes you think that they don't save money? looking at the state of public services and infrastructures (at least in my country), I can see how we don't spend as much as we should, which I suppose qualifies as saving. Budgets for education, justice, police, healthcare often decrease too. Also seeing how many billionaires we have, it's also obvious to me that we actually need more tax, not less.
Basically make a pledge to never raise taxes. It was called norquist pledge. Signers promise to oppose any and all efforts to increase marginal income tax rates for individuals and businesses.
Questionable whether this actually constrained spending. Ideally would be paired w balance budget amendment
It worked for France after the invention of the guillotine.
ChrisArchitect•1h ago