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France weighs 'culture tax'
- k-mcgrady 14y agoIf this passed the companies they tax would just pass it on to the consumer. e.g. Apple products are regularly claimed to be much more expensive in the UK but it's mainly due to VAT.
- digz 14y agoYep. Which will marginally decrease the purchase of smartphones, which will marginally decrease the revenue to the french telecoms, which would force jobs to be lost, but <sarcasm>thankfully</sarcasm>, french companies aren't really allowed to fire people. This is a classic deadweight loss. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss
- outside1234 14y ago> french companies aren't really allowed to fire people. which means each person gets paid proportionate less, so essentially the French pay for this in lower wages.
- ekianjo 14y agoYeah, but there is also a limit for the minimum wage, so the flexibility in terms of salary is... narrow.
- tarellel 14y agoWhat a crock! Just another way for a country aching for money to attempt to strategically milk other countries corporate architecture.
- mmanfrin 14y agoFrench officials are also pushing to ensure that French cultural products, and notably the audiovisual sector, remain exempt from free trade rules during talks on a planned trade agreement between the European Union and the United States. I.e., tax American/Foreign products only. I.e. a tariff. I.e. illegal under the WTO.
- ekianjo 14y agoWell, it's not like we manufacture anything in France anymore :)
- lotsofcows 14y agoWhile manufacturing's been on a downwards trend during the recession, almost 20% of France's GDP comes from manufacturing - greater than USA or UK - similar to Germany and Japan.
- ekianjo 14y agoMaybe, but what kind of manufacturing are we talking about, and how much is really privately-owned and not state-owned or state-subsidized? That is the real question to determine if it is comparable with US or Japan for that matter.
- Egregore 14y agoI don't live in France, but I use Tefal frying pan, which is said to be manufactured in France.
- michaelt 14y agoIf the WTO treaty was a one-liner saying "No tariffs, no subsidies" you'd be right. But in fact provisions for films have been in WTO treaties since at least 1947 [1] and France just doesn't want to remove them. Weird-but-legal tariffs and subsidies are nothing new - look at all the agricultural subsidies that are permitted, for example. [1] http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/gatt47_01_e.htm#articleIV http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/gatt47_01_e.htm#ar...
- bane 14y agoFrance is weird. Much of the world embraced French culture, then added local flavor and developed all kinds of great stuff. Now it's time for France to do the same. When France cooperates a little, awesome fun and exciting things come from it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_fifth_element http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_fifth_element
- ekianjo 14y agowhat do you mean by "Much of the world embraced French culture" ? What parts of the culture are you referring to ? Certainly not politics...
- joyeuse6701 14y agolanguage for one, 'culture' is a french word or latin if we wanna go further.
- ekianjo 14y agoLanguage, it's not like you had a choice in the matter. The invasion of England by the French-Norman in 11th century did a lot more to implant French language into English than whatever cultural influence France had after that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England#Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England#Lan...
- joyeuse6701 14y agoJust because you are invaded does not mean one culture is forced to Russia and France would be a good example. Another example: Japanese has taken a lot of french words as well, without having been invaded by France: http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/french.html http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/french.html
- ekianjo 14y agoPlease, don't compare the french influence in Japanese to the French influence in English. The french influence in Japanese is a best anecdotal, while French's influence in the English language was phenomenal. Look at what the English language look like in Beowulf and see how much french vocabulary has been borrowed from French since then. Now there's probably between 30 to 40% of words derived or directly taken from Old French in English. Nothing common with Japanese in that regard, and I speak Japanese myself so I know this matter fairly well enough.
- outside1234 14y agoHai there France, its the WTO calling. PS. I can't for the life of me understand why having TV equals culture. Honestly, IMO they should impose a tax on televisions so people buy less of them so there is LESS TV if they really want culture.
- Fargren 14y agoYou don't get to decide what's culture and what's not. The world would be a much bleaker place without the likes of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, Lost, or Adventure Time.
- derleth 14y agoTV is culture for the same reasons books are culture. Neither is inherently better.
- te_chris 14y ago(I read through your comments to work out if you're american so this may be off, but..) An American who wasn't raised with a culture of high quality, non-commercial cultural production would say that.
- yardie 14y agoOnly smug, assholes get to decide what is high quality culture these days.
- gilgoomesh 14y ago> IMO they should impose a tax on televisions If you read the article, you'll notice that there is already a tax on "television users". This proposal is about extending that tax to cover other devices that carry cultural entertainment. Not that I agree with this or any other narrow taxation. If cultural funding is deemed important, it should be funded through broad taxation like any other service that is considered important.
- potatolicious 14y agoIn some countries public broadcasters don't have to stop the program every 15 minutes to beg for money, like the PBS does. See: the CBC and BBC. There are ways for television to surpass the lowest-common-denominator - we just don't see this often in the USA, but it does happen elsewhere. Government funded art need not be limited to crazy modernist sculptures sitting in front of government buildings.
- crazygringo 14y agoTitle appears inaccurate, according to the article itself: > on technology giants like Apple and Google > taxes on sales of smart-phones and tablets > The proposed tax would mirror fees already paid by television users, TV and radio broadcasters and Internet service providers So it's nothing specific towards Apple or Google, or "anti-American", as far as I can tell from the article. It's just a device tax. So, seems a bit sensationalist.
- ekianjo 14y agoThe government is desperately out of cash, they will be looking for new taxes everywhere possible (instead of cutting their expenses, as usual), especially on what's popular. It's a wonder they have not touched at Smartphones and similar devices yet.
- carlob 14y agoMaybe the French government is out of money, and they might be even desperate, but first of all this money will be earmarked for the production of independent movies and the like. Secondly and more importantly when the French elected a socialist president they where expecting more actions like this one and many commentators think the government is not doing enough and is still too enterprise-friendly.
- jamesaguilar 14y agoIndeed, and it's not like the tech giants will pay for the tax anyway. It will be the french citizenry who pay in the form of higher prices on goods (to some extent, depending on elasticity, YMMV, no purchase necessary, etc.).
- ekianjo 14y agoWell they can earmark it where they like, it does not change the fact the country's first budget (even before Education) is dedicated to debt repayment. And things will only get worse as the confidence in the Eurozone erodes, sending future debt rates to the roof. They won't be solving much by raising taxes, and at one point raising taxes will definitely have a negative effect (i.e. significantly hurt consumption and therefore reduce the government revenues - we may already be at that point).
- pixelcort 14y agoWait, shouldn't we be trying to discourage cultural creation by the media and instead encourage peer-to-peer cultural development? I'm assuming that, although this mentions the funds would be widely distibuted, it would end up in the hands of major media companies.
- outside1234 14y agoexactly. that's exactly what they want - more money for the bureaucratic AND the major media.
- mindjiver 14y agoOf course, this is France we are talking about :) So either large politically connected media companies or large state bureaucracies will benefit from this.
- yogar 14y agoSo if you have already paid tax for culture, does that entitle you to download it for free? Is it not a public good after that?
- mercurial 14y agoNo, it's a double penalty system. You use a storage media, you are guilty per definition, but you will get additional punishment if you are caught illegally downloading copyrighted material.
- dvhh 14y agoAt least a nice pretense to tax those company which regularly escaping tax. As far as I remember there was a digital storage tax in France for that purpose (blank media, extended to HDD, and finally extended to computer )
- azinman2 14y agoInstead of understanding what needs to change to enable tech entrepreneurism in France (such as changes to bankruptcy and labor laws), they tax it to encourage the things that they're good at -- that don't make any money. Or... they could make the fundamental changes that will yield additional domestic tax revenue and use that to pay for art. Nah... that'd be "un-French."
- kfk 14y agoEurope is slipping down the wrong path. Instead of embracing the new, it's holding tighter and tighter the old. In Italy there are many commercials about the good old days that is frightening. And the very bad thing is that those that are below 40 or 30 or 20 are aiming at what the "old" people have or had, so they stay quite, they don't complain, and wait for their turn to be rich. This is an extremely dangerous situation. There is no way in the world that with that kind of thinking we get out of the debt crisis. There is no way in the world that we even can keep up our promises of a welfare State in the future. This will create higher and higher social friction; somehow France is showing this earlier than other countries (must be a French thing, like the French revolution, they always come first). I mean, increasing taxation, without spending cuts, ends up mostly affecting the young. But if the young stay quiet and wait, who is going to fight this back? That's probably 1 of the biggest problems we have in Europe nowadays: the people that should fight for change and a liberal economy are not, they actually want a protected economy because they want the old to stay healthy, so they will be when they replace them.