Hungary To Tax Internet Traffic 324
An anonymous reader writes: The Hungarian government has announced a new tax on internet traffic: 150 HUF ($0.62 USD) per gigabyte. In Hungary, a monthly internet subscription costs around 4,000-10,000 HUF ($17-$41), so it could really put a constraint on different service providers, especially for streaming media. This kind of tax could set back the country's technological development by some 20 years — to the pre-internet age. As a side note, the Hungarian government's budget is running at a serious deficit. The internet tax is officially expected to bring in about 20 billion HUF in income, though a quick look at the BIX (Budapest Internet Exchange) and a bit of math suggests a better estimate of the income would probably be an order of magnitude higher.
Nah, this is just stage 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -- Ronald Reagan
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How is "OMG I can't afford to stream 8 hours of video a day any more" going to set society back 20 years? If anything, it will be a huge improvement.
People are rational actors, and demand for internet is flexible. The cheaper it is, the more people use. Raise the price, they cut back and substitute another product (dvds, other activities). Same as any other non-essential service.
The "Information superhighway" hasn't existed for years. It was replaced by streaming entertainment. Actual "information",
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The fact that people will find ways of routing around the problem is exactly why this is a bad idea. Having Linux Install-Fests was exactly what people did 15 years ago, which just goes to show that taxing internet usage will actually stifle technology.
The install-fests were actually better than people just downloading $RANDOM_DISTRO and not having anyone around to help them when things almost invariably go wrong. Since the passing of install-fests, the portion of linux on the desktop has declined, so the convenience of the innert00bs may have actually stifled some adoption.
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"How is "OMG I can't afford to stream 8 hours of video a day any more" going to set society back 20 years?"
"Raise the price, they cut back and substitute another product (dvds..."
Which part of the 1990s did you miss?
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Connection Established... ...
Welcome to Pirate ISP, the place where we don't care about taxes.
Re:Nah, this is just stage 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
You forget that once you METER something, then it effects everything down the line. It's not just the payment -- it's the effort involved in dealing with the payment.
If someone at a school or business has to create a purchase order to request "X amount of projected Bits of Internet use" -- then the school/business has to meter and check and someone has to approve and someone else has to check the process.
Sure the internet is a flexible commodity -- but it's not just the COST that will go up, it's the speed that will go down. You've just changed it from free form expression to something that has to be justified each and every time. Might as well get out that AOL floppy and fire up the old Modem and see if the government is checking the phone lines.
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Only if you're stuck with a shitty provider, usually a monopoly.
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Oh, well, if all we have to do is regress our technology, then the tax isn't onerous at all. Bunch of whiners. Pull out your #2 pencils and slide rules (in imperial) and shut up.
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The issue I was highlighting is that more than half the bandwidth consumed is by video, and is definitely not essential. Neither netflix nor youtube, which contribute to more than half of ALL internet bandwidth usage, are essential. Cut off streaming video and your bandwidth requirements drop significantly.
And the issue I was highlightning is, is that you just stop where your convenience is not affected. This is as arbritrary as it is selfish. You don't care about it, so it is a good thing if it disappears. People actually use Youtube and other other data intensive services for usefull things, for many people it actually would be a bad thing if they couldn't use it anymore. In Hungary Orban is severely limiting independent Radio and TV. The internet provides the last ressort to stream media critical of the g
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How is "OMG I can't afford to stream 8 hours of video a day any more" going to set society back 20 years? If anything, it will be a huge improvement.
OK. So it will only set it back 10 years to the pre-internet-streaming days. I suppose Netflix and its Hungarian competitors may see revenue loss.
Some other ways to lower bandwitdth useage. Stop buying games that stream over the internet (loss of sales again), stop your updates from downloading as they can be quite large (cyber-security issues increase as people's PCs become less secure). You can also stop using video conferencing and, perhaps VoIP.
Won't do well for OS's that stream either (LINUX).
I can see
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Another reading comprehension fail by yet another poster. What is it today?
I wrote:
More (much more) than half of all beverage sales in fast-food restaurants are for soft drinks.
And of course, someone who can't read replies:
I find it hard to believe that the drink costs more than the burger AND fries at a fast food restaurant (hint: it doesn't).
That's NOT what I wrote. McDonalds sells far more soft drinks than, for example, fruit juice. They're trying to increase their coffee sales, but that effort has resulted in a decline in their same-store sales in the last quarter (since putting ad dollars into pushing coffee instead of big-mac-fries-and-a-coke has a knock-on effect).
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I work from home mostly because it's cheaper than driving into an office. I use in the area of 300Gb a month if a $0.62/Gb tax was implemented the tax would be 4 times my subscription fee and it would suddenly be cheaper to drive.
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In my case my internet provider charges me a set amount for up to 350Gb that tax is over 400% my subscription fee if I were to use all 350Gb. The tax would also effect internet based businesses it is an undue burden.
Re:Nah, this is just stage 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just about streaming. Downloading a modern Linux distro will now cost Hungarians almost five bucks. Downloading a current-gen game on steam, which will already cost them €60 (roughly 80 dollars) will now cost 15 dollars more.
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I was thinking along your lines, instead of getting rid of all the video, though, I think people would get back to the habit of downloading and sharing stuff via local networks or sneakernet, and discover ways to keep local storage in sync like with git annex [branchable.com]. Also, online content that is DRM and stream-only would suffer.
But this would make some big interests very upset, and Hungary government is no match for them, so they will find some way to curb alternative uses of networking. This means that we won't s
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Re:Nah, this is just stage 1 NOT (Score:2)
Stage 1 was confiscation of private pensions [csmonitor.com]. No nation can not tax or confiscate its way out of political incompetence and corruption. This road leads to anarchy or war.
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Nice to see that the Christian Science Monitor completely misses the raid by Gordon Brown and the Labour Party after they won the elections in 1997 in the UK - they raided pension funds to the tune of £5Billion a year from the very start.
Re:Nah, this is just stage 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone getting mod points as "insightful" for quoting Reagan shows that we still have people who haven't figured out that Supply Side is a fancy term for Economic Royalists about to crash the economy.
It takes a lot of myopia and selecting history editing to make anything from the Reagan era a good idea. Most Reagan fans still have not figured out that he doubled taxes on the self employed and only lowered it for businesses and the wealthy. Sure, this sounds like a troll comment -- but the difference is; it's true.
Oh, and Reaganites doubled the money going to Social Security -- which was right (except for the limit that kept wealthy people from paying more), so that SS is solvent. And yet, nobody knows that it's SUPPOSED to zero out around the time baby boomers are in the grave because it's mostly a transfer fund,... that's probably going to come as a shock and nonsense to most. That's why we have Think Tanks, so everyone else stops thinking.
Re: Nah, this is just stage 1 (Score:2)
Solvent? There is nothing but IOU's in the "trust fund" - future taxation is the plan for paying out SS. Between that and Medicare for the boomers, each non-retiree (man , woman, and child) is on the hook for $900K in additional taxation over the boomers' retirement. Gene therapy will be banned and age wars seem possible. Arithmetic is inflexible that way.
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/06/... [npr.org]
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This nonsense again? Those are Treasury Bonds, not IOU's. If the U.S. up and declares trillions of bonds to be null and void, what do you think is going to happen to it's fiat currency? The USG would rather deal with an invasion than let that happen.
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Still, the Trust Fund seems like a rather odd concept. It's a government promise to pay for... something it had already promised to pay, namely Social Security benefits. If the Trust Fund runs out, it's still on the hook to pay those benefits.
The program was intended to be pay-as-you-go. The SSTF was supposed to be a way to save against the Baby Bust being unable to pay for its parents, but where can you really save that kind of money? No bank can handle it; it would badly skew any stock market you tried to
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Supply side is the only economics that exist, if there is no supply there is no economy, all real economies are based on creating stuff, consumption is the trivial part of the process.
Of-course to consume you have to produce, which means if you are unproductive you cannot afford to consume what other people produce and what the economy became with all the taxing, regulations and inflation (money printing) is exactly this: vendor financed consumption without any chance of returning the debt that is accumulat
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That's why we have Think Tanks, so everyone else stops thinking.
This. So much this. And the other stuff as well. But this...
Re:Nah, this is just stage 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
The original post makes a good point about the stifling effects of over-taxation and over-regulation - not some argument for supply side economics.
Did you even think about the post, or did you immediately start typing up your anti-Reagan blast? Did you listen, or wait to talk?
It's amazing how reactionary people are online these days. Look at some of the other responses besides this one. They can be summed up with - "Ohhp... someone said Ronald Reagan. Nanananana - not listening!".
And people on the left wonder why Barack Obama's better ideas get buried in a wave of "rethuglican" ignorance - the exact, same way. Critical thought has given away to intellectual laziness and yelling factoids back and forth. No respect or compassion or will to work together... just "win the next election."
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Orban's regime borders on fascism, I wouldn't call it a democracy. His policies are a lot closer to those of Putin rather than classical fascism, though.
Re:Nah, this is just stage 1 (Score:5, Informative)
Orban's regime borders on fascism, I wouldn't call it a democracy. His policies are a lot closer to those of Putin rather than classical fascism, though.
The term is neo-fascism...
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To clarify, in a speech this July, Hungarian prime minister Orban has given some examples of countries that he considers successful, and the systems of which he thinks are worth imitating. Those countries are Russia, China, Turkey and Singapore. He specifically noted that they are "not Western, not liberal, not liberal democracies, maybe not even democracies", and went on to say that "“I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on nat
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When you start with "Reagan said..." you've already simplified beyond recognition.
Most anecdotes Reagan had of "this guy I know who could no longer help his children because of ____ " -- they were all completely made up. He got that bedtime story voice and a boatload of Bull -- and THAT sounds like a guy making sense and being authentic to a lot of fools. Reagan made a lot more sense before he sold out his Liberal rhetoric and started betraying actors for Hoover.
Does badmouthing a saint count as blasphemy? Ah! What the heck..... BLASPHEMER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Nice throwaway slam - Want to borrow a crowbar to get that foot out of your mouth?
Because, for the most part, Libertarians hate Reagan [lp.org]. Despite how you might prefer to demonize Libertarians, laissez faire doesn't mean "subsidize the rich".
Kinda funny how taxes set back the internet (Score:3, Interesting)
So taxes "set back the country's technological development by some 20 years", and when it's the internet the Slashdot crowd agrees.
But if it's anything else, taxes are so great. "Pay your share!" Despite the fact that the government doing the taxing is just going to use those resources against you in the form of militarized police, warrantless wiretaps, and drone surveillance.
Re:Kinda funny how taxes set back the internet (Score:4, Informative)
Errr... so I am sympathetic to the argument in general, but this case is about Hungary, not the US.
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But if it's anything else, taxes are so great. "Pay your share!" Despite the fact that the government doing the taxing is just going to use those resources against you in the form of militarized police, warrantless wiretaps, and drone surveillance.
The problem here is not the principle of paying your taxes, but that you guys keep electing the wrong people into office and don't punish them for giving you all that crap.
It doesn't matter what else you do. As long as you keep electing bad governments, you're going to get bad governance. Nothing is going to fix your problems until you fix that.
Re: Kinda funny how taxes set back the internet (Score:2)
and since there are no historical examples of a non-abusive government, minimizing taxation is the only way to minimize abusiveness.
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Re:Kinda funny how taxes set back the internet (Score:5, Insightful)
You're talking over half a buck ($0.62) per gigabyte.
Think about this in terms of AT&T's DSL service. Where you're capped at 150GB (and it's ridiculously easy to exceed).
That's an additional $93 over and above the cost of the connection itself! The ISPs are currently selling connections for $20-40 a pop.
How, EXACTLY, are ISPs supposed to simply absorb these costs?
The correct answer is "they aren't".
So the additional costs are going to get kicked onto the end-user's bill.
Now imagine your $20 a month internet services suddenly becoming a $110 a month internet service.
This is a way to encourage people to NEVER use their internet service.
It's the sort of thing that can cripple the entire industry in that country.
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Internet service is taxed in the US, right? In some way? I guess I could look at my bill, but aren't there any fees such as exist with a landline?
Not that I'm saying it should/shouldn't be taxed, but...
Say there is a really popular forum (the physical kind, not internet) for people to mingle with other people and discuss/argue about anything they feel like talking about.
Let's say there is some monthly membership fee paid to the government for the use of the place, say $10/month.
Now, imagine if the gov
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Yes, there is stuff that is taxed not just by VAT, for example alcohols, tobacco, petrol and such. Is that fair? Debatable, since you could argue "They cost public
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There's another term for self-important elitists paying their share of taxes: guillotine insurance.
Despite the fact that the largest post-Vietnam increases in war spending happened after Reagan's budget busting tax cuts and then again after Bush II's budget busting
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Wait, what? We reading the same website here?
The same website where we routinely see rants about attempts to tax Amazon? Where people seethe over paying POTS-era taxes on data-only cell plans? Where people routinely complain that we need to do away with SS and privatize all retirement benefits? Where Obamacare causes flamewars and we consider WIC a necessary evil?
Offhand, I can think of only a single pro-tax issue generally considered "great" among Sl
Can I get the jelly filled one? (Score:2, Funny)
Mmmm, Internet tax!
sounds like a hoax (Score:2)
Or something essential was lost in translation.
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Hey, it was! This is just a draft proposal. Nothing implemented yet.
So what are you paying for? (Score:2)
Surely there's more to come :( (Score:5, Interesting)
Hungary is, sadly, turning into authoritarian regime focused on maintaining the power of those at the top. Anything that feeds their spending habits is on the table, I'm sure. We should expect more news like that coming from Hungary :(
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They should tax the bad news about the Hungarian government 3X if they really wanted to make money and put the boot down.
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It says the average is $17-$41 USD I have no idea what the US average is but in my area of the mid-west $39 for a middle tier account is fairly common.
Already taxed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't the Internet already taxed? Not sure about Hungary, but most places you're taxed for the computer you buy, and for Internet service you get from a provider. The provider is likely taxed for the copper/fiber, taxed for the employees they have, the equipment they purchase. Electricity, real estate, etc related to this endeavor. That's all taxed. Sounds like a desperate government out of ideas.
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But Verizon owns the road and maintains it, if we follow your analogy.
And I pay to drive on the NJ Turnpike, which is privately owned.
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Well, aren't cell taxes for the use of government owned frequencies? Some cell towers might also be on public lands.
And gas tax is meant for public road maintenance. When I am on the Turnpike, my EZ-Pass fee is what pays for this private road's maintenance. Don't confuse the two. Imagine that public roads don't exist. I pay directly for use of privately-owned infrastructure. Verizon's fiber to the house is privately owned. They pay the government taxes on it already, and pass that cost onto me. The
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This must be a second tax on the internet. Seems excessive.
What looks like a stupid tax from the US... (Score:5, Interesting)
... looks like an attempt to restrict free speech from a little closer to Hungary. The current regime has serious totaliarian tendencies and this tax (which will raise internet connection prices) leaves less avenues of communication for the Hungarian citizens.
Note the prices for an internet connection; at 30 gbytes/month, this tax could double the entry level price. At the average salary in Hungary, the extra $18 will be felt.
The sky is falling.....again? (Score:5, Informative)
Government running a serious deficit? (Score:3)
I am absolutely shocked. How about they cut their goddamn spending and subsist on the taxes they are already collecting before instituting a ridiculous "per-GB" internet tax. FFS, does the idea of spending less money ever even cross a government's mind? Now, before I get branded some evil right-winger racist luddite tinfoil hat wearing neanderthal, I don't disagree with taxes that perform a function.
If the government is providing a service or function, such as roads, technological infrastructure, schools, etc. I fully agree with taxes to support them. But taxing arbitrary goods/services provided by third parties just because you want to keep living high on the hog? That, to me, is a sickening example of why spending needs to be scrutinized and real fiscal responsibility needs to be in place in government. It's just too easy to keep spending when it's everyone else's money.
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Not really. What I'm saying is don't make spending commitments that you do not have a source of revenue to back it up with. Government is great at spending money that they don't have when they know all they need to do is steal some more from the public at a later date and everything will work out for them in the end.
Blackout them (Score:3)
Ahhh... (Score:2)
Attempted Censorship by any other name....
This is insane. (Score:2)
A Serious Deficit, You Say? (Score:3)
Yes, adding yet another tax is one way to help that, but why do governments worldwide - mine included - never consider the possibility that they're spending too much money? When our government is spending money on swedish massages for rabbits [washingtontimes.com] and then whining that they don't have enough cash to toss around, I am completely uninterested in giving them a single penny more.
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Why not just raise the overall tax levels? (Score:2)
If the government needs to collect more tax, why not raise the general tax levels rather than introduce this tax? The tax burden will be the same in both cases, but the internet tax takes it all from internet users rather than spreading it out (or even taking it preferentially from those who can afford it, like progressive tax does).
The main argument for specific taxes like this is to use it as an incentive for people to change their behavior. For example, one may tax driving in city centers to reduce the c
I see what they wanted to do here... (Score:2)
They did it wrong clearly.
The idea is that a certain amount of the economy is flowing through the internet and the government feels it has a right a fraction of that just as they claim from everything.
I can get that far.
Then I get what they did by charging by bandwidth. This is an attempt to make the tax progressive so that small users pay very little and big users pay a lot. I get that too.
The problem with this idea is that the amount of traffic is accelerating and the tax isn't reasonable if everyone's in
Get a virus... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hungary is becoming a totalitarian state (Score:3)
The prime minister of Hungary wants to transform Hungary into a "un liberal" state. In short he wants to play Putin in his country. His primary goal right now is to push out any foreign investment. This new law targets that and in addition may help to control the opposition. The normal media is already under his control.
A yes and in addition Hungary is becoming more and more racist.
going back to the dark ages isn't all bad (Score:2)
Re:A few things... (Score:5, Informative)
Hungarian dude here.
1. That will be delegated to the ISPs. The plan is, that the ISPs should pay these taxes from their profits, and are expected NOT to increase the internet subscription fees, however, they will anyhow.
2. It is a tax on everything. not just streaming.
3. They won't leave anything untaxed.
Re:A few things... (Score:5, Funny)
Your post just cost you 0.02 cents. Please pay up.
Re:A few things... (Score:4, Insightful)
0.02 what? Let's hope Hungarian ISPs can do math better than Verizon! [blogspot.com]
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Re:A few things... (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes but measured at what layer? Do Ethernet/ATM/PPP/IP/TCP headers count against the bandwidth? In some cases the headers make up biggest part of the bandwidth. I see this being a problem...
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Lrn2network before you get haughty with others on the subject. Keepalives, pings, dhcp requests... there are a shit-ton of ways to generate traffic where the header is the majority of the payload. No, it's not common for that to make up a significant portion of internet traffic per node, but it's certainly possible, and not at all "nonsense."
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Re:A few things... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Why should the ISP pay out of their profit?
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Isn't galosh a shoe? I think you meant goulash...but not entirely sure...
I think he meant gulag. The AC has no retirement plan, and so was planning to retire to "Club Fed" so to speak.
Re:A few things... (Score:4, Insightful)
My question is why a $0.62 USD tax on 1GB when a $1/month of 1mb/s can transfer 300GB? $186 of tax on $1 of service. That's a 18600% tax.
That's the most shocking thing, to me, about this proposal. It's a HUGE potential cost. It would make 'modern' web pages, with their kilobytes (or megabytes) of never-executed, embedded javascript, massive stylesheets, fancy images, and ads-ads-ads, extremely expensive. I would expect every Hungarian to immediately cancel any streaming service and to turn off "Auto load images" and "precache links." I would expect that Hungarian web sites would return to 1990's style terse HTML. That could be a good way to drastically reduce bandwith use in any country that implemented it and dramatically increase the pressure on ISPs to upgrade their networks.
Of course, applying it to the ISPs, rather than to the users, means that none of the bandwidth-conservation pressure will be applied to the people actually capable of affecting consumption, so it's likely to have no effect whatsoever. Except, maybe, to force all of the ISPs into bankruptcy
Re:A few things... (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks like "The power to tax is the power to destroy" is going to be demonstrated once again.
If Hungary the want's to jump back into the stone age, so be it. P.S. This is just Draft legislation.. If the proposal is made into law, I see Google, Yahoo, and every major ISP abandoning that country in short order. Same goes for any web hosting providers. Backbone providers will route their traffic around that tiny country. I expect the transition to be relatively dramatic.
One can only hope the voters recall their conservative stone age representatives and put in socialists in charge, with an eye to the future. I can also see the EU court stepping in an declaring this tax to be invalid/moot as a violation of human rights.
Re: A few things... (Score:2)
why? Because the interior minister's uncle wants a new boat. Oh sure, launder the cash through a few welfare programs, but more complex explanations are not required.
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Then they ought to restore Erzebet Bathory's castle and promote it as a tourist destination for lesbian Goths -- or is that too narrow a demographic?
More like the wrong demographic, for one thing there is no indication Erzebet Bathory was gay and secondly she preferred corn fed country girls for her grizzly beauty rituals so agricultural communities would be a more likely place to look for victims than towns and cities which is where you are most likely to run into lesbian Goths.
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The government's just hungary for money.
They'd better Czech how much they can make.
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They could Sweden the pot with consumer subsidies.
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There is a new Family Video attached to a pizza place in my town... They recently started delivering movies when you order pizza.
When ever I drive by, there are cars in the parking lot even before the pizza place opened, so I guess people still rent videos.