The downside of how it's done in Germany or the UK is that the fee isn't proportional to income, like taxes are (or are suppressed to be). And it doesn't have t

The downside of how it's done in Germany or the UK is that the fee isn't proportional to income, like taxes are (or are suppressed to be). And it doesn't have to be a choice between one or the other, a perfectly workable best of both worlds path exists, in Germany even: There's a concept called "church tax" that is handled, for those who are members in one of the "qualified" confessional church orgs (in this car, "qualification" basically boils down to Napoleonic age precedent but this is orthogonal to the topic at hand) by the tax collection authorities in a proxy role for the church orgs, but which is very clearly outside of government budget scope. Exactly the same setup could be used to collect income-based broadcast contributions without subjecting broadcasters to budgetary government influence.