Taxing the Economy

Yeah... this will work great!

European Union lawmakers are investigating a proposed tax on emails and mobile phone text messages as a way to fund the 25-member bloc in the future.

A European Parliament working group is reviewing the idea, tabled by Alain Lamassoure, a prominent French MEP and member of the centre-right European People's Party, the assembly's largest group.

Lamassoure, a member of Jacques Chirac's UMP party, is proposing to add a tax of around 1.5 cents on text or SMS messages and a 0.00001 cent levy on every email sent.

"This is peanuts, but given the billions of transactions every day, this could still raise an immense income," he said.

Those poor bastards who decided for themselves that the European Union would be a great thing, unfortunately forgot that yet another layer of government needs to come up with novel ways to pay for itself.

Economics and Markets Posted by AlexC at May 26, 2006 9:24 PM