Extraordinary Taxes

Extraordinary Taxes

While searching the precedents of extraordinary taxes in the world I have encountered a very interesting case about the tax on internet. Hungary intends to introduce this tax from the next year and it will charge about 0.6 USD for the every gigabyte used by the consumer. The tax officially will be paid by the internet service providers but not officially the consumers will also be affected and in my opinion tax burden on internet will be more for the consumers than for producers because a lot of people are depended on internet especially the business and no other alternative is left except the old method of exchanging the information which is much more costly and time consuming. This in my opinion the elasticity of the demand curve for the use of the internet tends to be more inelastic and as we know in this situation the greater tax burden lies upon the consumer. Generally public without the sufficient knowledge in economy will not realize it and believe the government that they as individuals are not paying this tax but the real situation is completely different.

Tax on internet is not the only case of extraordinary taxes in Hungary. For example few years ago government introduced new tax on the phone call according to the duration of the call and for the amount of text messages. The difference is that the tax on phone calls and messages has the monthly cap on the tax’s amount per customer while the tax on internet does not share such kind of feature.

There are a lot of critics from critics, economists and mainly from population. People think that the tax on internet limits the development of new technologies of 21st century in Hungary and also this will be unfair for the people who are the major users of the internet. Also very important fact consider is that nowadays internet contributes greatly to the education of the person and as for my experience I always try to find some publication, book or interesting source from internet rather...