The way this article is worded makes it sound like Denmark has a 'book tax'. Denmark has a VAT on goods (and services), which is 25%. But Denmark doesn't have split VAT values, so it's either 25% or nothing; no in-between. So they are just proposing removing the VAT from books. (Some goods and services are already exempt from VAT.)
And if you wonder why Denmark doesn't simply lower their VAT or introduce a split VAT system like in most other countries; the answer is technical inertia (or technical debt, if you will). Most Danish accounting and banking systems are hardcoded to assume 25% (or nothing). So if a politician want immediate change to VAT, removing it from a category of goods/services is their only option.
Edit: I realise I was careless in my wording, when I wrote "hardcoded to assume 25% (or nothing)"; I meant that the systems only assume one rate (or nothing), not that the value of 25% was hardcoded (though it is in a few (lesser) systems I've encountered). I apologise for the confusion.
Worth noting that controlling consumption via extra/less tax on specific products is debated a lot in Denmark. Namely cigarettes have a high added tax (about 2kr/0.3 usd PER cigarette). Increasing the tax and thus the price of cigarettes had a fairly large effect on consumption (0.13-0.82% less cigarettes consumed for every 1% price increase) [1].
Recently it has been debated to remove the VAT from vegetables and fruit to increase consumption of those.
The same logic is used for this book VAT exemption (which is good in my opinion) - I doubt we'll see the same effect though. Young people not reading is a complex problem to solve but books are really expensive to buy, so it's a good place to start.
> the answer is technical inertia (or technical debt, if you will)
One of the issues. There are number of others. For example, VAT is a value-based tax. A VAT cut gives the biggest savings to people who spend the most. Since wealthier people typically spend more, they would save more money in absolute terms. For example, a family with a food budget of 3,000 kr. would save 300 kr., while a family with a food budget of 8,000 kr. would save 800 kr. Politically, some parties might prefer tax breaks that focused on lower-income groups.
Another issue, will the cost savings actually be passed on to the consumer?
VAT can be considered a regressive tax because the poorer I am, the more of my money I spend on goods and services, and the less on savings and investments. As a proportion of income, poor people spend more on VAT than rich people. I think it’s about double, in the UK.
So you’re right that cutting VAT helps richer people more in absolute terms. But in terms of of quality of life it helps poorer people more.
[edit] assuming we’re talking about VAT on things that everyone buys. Which is why tax codes often exempt essential items from VAT.
Give people as a whole more money and they can spend it on housing. Given the decades long supply problem with housing it simply means rents increase to fill the void.
I was under the impression that VAT taxes are considered to impact mostly the poor. While in absolute terms the rich are impacted most, in percentage terms VAT is considered a much smaller portion of expenses for the rich than the poor. I quote:
"VAT is a regressive tax, putting more burden to the poor than to the rich. Indeed, VAT applies the same rate to everyone regardless of their level of wealth – but the richer you are, the lower the proportion of your revenue goes to consumption."
In the U.K. most living expenses are don’t get charged vat, or get charged at a low rate - food, rent, public transport are vat free, electric, gas are low rated.
I find this logic extremely flawed. If you save half, you save half. If someone saves a lot more than you as a result, it mains they paid a lot more before, and is still paying a lot more than you now. As fair as it gets. Those that complain are usually imagining a robin-hood esque system where the tax progresses towards 100% as income goes up.
Trying to heavily tax billionaires is one thing, but the issue with them is tax avoidance by virtue of these complicated systems, and a lot of the incremental taxes land on people just plain working their ass off, getting no sleep, high stress and high blood pressure as a result. If someone has more because they worked more, they're entitled to exactly that.
Incremental tax also means that if you have a good year and a bad year you pay way more tax than if you just had two average years. Not to mention that such complicated tax is what enables tax optimization whereby those higher up can end up paying less tax. It's stupid.
Hmm. You say "tax break" but I could argue split VAT results in the opposite: a hike in consumption tax. The base VAT rate can be set higher if the VAT on desirable consumption is lower. I.e. it's not that rich people pay less tax for books -- it's that rich people pay more tax for non-books!
Note that while you have 25% VAT on things, actual VAT accounting is fully dynamic and banking and accounting systems handle this just fine.
On the incoming side, bills can come from other countries with an entirely arbitrary VAT value, so there the VAT value is recorded from the bill.
On the VAT refund side, arbitrary values are used even for Danish VAT, as companies can get full, fixed fraction or even entirely variable fraction if VAT refunded. For example, a company dinner can only be partially VAT refunded as you had private benefit of food, and VAT refund of an asset like a van is the set by the ratio of intended company vs private usage.
On the outgoing side, most banking and accounting systems would be prepared for other EU countries.
There's definitely going to be something hardcoded somewhere (including over 9000 times in the tax systems themselves), but the point is that VAT is already a dynamic size.
That general incompetency you're referring to there can also be worded as
For years they didn't build unneeded complexity. And it sounds like for many more years to come. So they're just efficient. Any developer will have had to make things configurable afterwards, that's fine, just evolution of code.
Hard coding also means that it's less likely to break. No customer (in Denmark) can influence this, so why make it configurable?
Over time this does become a problem when source code is lost/companies go under.
Considering that's 25 year old code I'd expect at least a
#define VAT 0.25
and not hardcoded values all around the source code. However I don't expect a table (db table, array, etc) of product categories with their own VAT code or a user defined exception list. That extra code would inevitably add bugs that are not worth the trouble. Adding an exception for books probably requires an update of the apps.
Such a constant would be no better -- they don't want to change the VAT rate across all product types.
The code missing is that for per-product type variation in VAT rate, which sounds complicated enough that Iawould expect a good engineer to shrug and say YAGNI until it's actually necessary.
VAT rate can and does change. As such it can be different on different dates. And this change might not even correspond to change of year. So it really has no place in code.
So if the House introduced a 'fixed' VAT tomorrow, say $1, not proportional to the price of the product, would that not break most software used to compute VATs?
We have to make assumptions.
Good software doesn't account for every future possiblity, but it is easy to change when the requirements change.
What is the primary reason for hard-coding these kinds of things? Gotta imagine CScientists would have debated this during the design phase. I have some hypotheses, are any of these right?
* correctness/verifiability analyses
* security? in compiled tools (prevent malicious re-configuration)
There's absolutely no reason to hard-code the value. That's just bad programming.
However you can't expect programmers to predict all possible future compatibility.
In my country VAT has a current rate. That rate can, and has, changed. But we have one rate. Some goods are exempt, but products have a VAT yes/no field.
Perhaps in the future the system will change. One possible change is that VAT attracts different % for different products. I'm not predicting that, or coding for it now. VAT rules could change to anything- I can't code against that.
The real problem is actually less the exact rate of 25%, but rather that most of the systems only assume one rate. Denmark was the first country to introduce a general VAT in 1967, and whilst the rate has changed (last in 1992 to 25%), the number of rates have not. So lowering the general VAT rate would likely be possible in a 1-3 year time frame (depending on unknown factors), but lowering the general VAT rate would be a significant loss on state finances (thus not interesting to politicians) (and as someone else pointed out, it mostly favours high spenders, which is also politically dicey).
However, introducing a split rate would definitely require a time frame of at least 4 years, and no politician are willing to wait that long for a politician win.
Imagine the complexity of correctly accounting for a VAT when rates vary dependin on product type -- and doing it across an entire national economy! I'm glad they don't support that for as long as they don't have to.
Is it doable? Sure. Does it need resources that could be more fruitfully applied elsewhere? Probably.
Funnily enough only EU country with no reduced rates on some products is Denmark. So pretty much any system used in other countries already takes this in account.
Germany uses 7% VAT on books and a few other things (taxi rides, food). 19% is the regular VAT tariff. But going out for food and drinks is still reasonably affordable here compared to other EU countries (and never mind the UK and US where this is super expensive). I buy a lot of ebooks as well.
I'm definitely a bit price sensitive. For me the sweet spot is around 10 euros. Anything above is kind of a big expense and I'll think twice. But a book priced around 7 euros I'll just buy it even if I'm not 100% sure if I'll like it. I might be reading a lot less if those prices were creeping up. So, I can see how this might help more Danes get more into reading.
Reading books is something that high school erodes as a pleasurable activity (by making you read the wrong stuff). I got back into reading after high school when I was again able to read what I wanted and when I wanted again but not everybody does that. I was actually reading a lot before going to high school.
I expect that the Danish educational system might be hammering the fun out of reading in a similar way. Getting kids to read is easier if you give them the right books. If you've ever seen a small kid completely absorbed in a book you know what I'm talking about. I was like that. Force feeding kids dreary literary works is not necessarily the best way to get people into reading. The main learning that re-enforces in kids is that apparently they don't like reading. It's counter productive.
And of course the elephant in the room here is that Denmark is not a big country and that there are probably only so many Danish authors actually worth reading. A good benchmark would be counting the ones that get translated and have an international audience. The same is true in the Netherlands. Only a handful of authors that publishers consider worth translating. And of course the education system puts a lot of emphasis on a handful of native authors that the rest of the world would never have heard about.
I fully agree with you that forced "literature" lessons suck the fun out of reading. As someone who had to go through it in the Netherlands I've sworn off Dutch authors in response, and haven't read Dutch literature for over 2 decades.
What is people doing instead of reading? Social media is designed to be extremely addictive. It taps also on teenagers fears of failing to fit in.
I love HN for being a place for discussion. But most social media is a one way trend setting communication. Miss it and you are out of touch with everybody else. And it moves fast.
What people need is time for themselves with their own thoughts. That creates the opportunity to read and do other things. A phone that requires 100% of your attention span does not allow for that. And big tech puts billions on tracking and data gathering to better know what keeps people hooked and dependent.
> The latest education report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) raised alarm in Denmark when it found 24% of Danish 15-year-olds cannot understand a simple text, up four percentage points in a decade.
So, in 2015, 20% of 15-yo could not understand a simple text. Isn't that unbelievably high?
In 2015 (or some other year), they calculated the bottom quintile (or maybe quartile) score of students on some reading assessment, declared this to be the lowest level of reading competency, and wrote a helpful explanation that people who score at the lowest level of reading competency struggle with simple texts. But there's no single simple text that you could point to where people below the threshold completely fail to understand it and people above the threshold easily breeze through.
Because reading competency isn't binary like that. Reading competency is binary in that complete illiterates cannot read at all and people who aren't complete illiterates typically can read quite a lot, but there probably aren't enough actual illiterates in Denmark to produce scary-sounding statistics. So instead you get arbitrary thresholds that don't mean what they claim to mean.
This article[0], which covers the same but in Danish has more details. It mentions Sweden lowering their book VAT in 2001 to 6%. The takeaway was that more books were sold, but to people who were already buying books. Getting new readers thus requires an additional effort than merely lowering the cost.
Back then there were only linear tv and no social media. I know in my social circles back then in Sweden it was even trendy to read and lots of discussions between friends and even during family events between the teenagers about books.
So yes it was a totally different landscape back then.
True, but also there is a commonly accepted rule in economics where taxing something disincentivizes consumption of that thing. Usually when you lift taxes on something you will see a rise in consumption on that thing. But it remains to be seen if the 15 year olds in this situation will be the ones to consume more of it.
Seriously though, I think the problem is not so much the particular tax on books (though this measure would help) but the way those taxes are computed.
This is just a dumb idea, but if a company or a person has X amount of money to put into a product that then can be sold in essentially free-to-produce copies at a Y price, and then a consumer spends an amount of time Z consuming it, then there should be a tax computed on those three variables X, Y, Z. The idea being that huge actors with high X can end up having a lot of Z. And Z is citizen time, which is dangerous to let it be captured by the interests of big capital in detriment to the interests of lesser capital and other people. But I guess that sounds too socialist :-( .
I cannot believe there are people who expect the government to solve every problem when they can't even stop themselves from causing problems left right and centre. Even a child would make the correct inference that taxing books at 25% would not have a positive impact on reading rates. Boggles the mind really.
The way this article is worded makes it sound like Denmark has a 'book tax'. Denmark has a VAT on goods (and services), which is 25%. But Denmark doesn't have split VAT values, so it's either 25% or nothing; no in-between. So they are just proposing removing the VAT from books. (Some goods and services are already exempt from VAT.)
And if you wonder why Denmark doesn't simply lower their VAT or introduce a split VAT system like in most other countries; the answer is technical inertia (or technical debt, if you will). Most Danish accounting and banking systems are hardcoded to assume 25% (or nothing). So if a politician want immediate change to VAT, removing it from a category of goods/services is their only option.
Edit: I realise I was careless in my wording, when I wrote "hardcoded to assume 25% (or nothing)"; I meant that the systems only assume one rate (or nothing), not that the value of 25% was hardcoded (though it is in a few (lesser) systems I've encountered). I apologise for the confusion.
Worth noting that controlling consumption via extra/less tax on specific products is debated a lot in Denmark. Namely cigarettes have a high added tax (about 2kr/0.3 usd PER cigarette). Increasing the tax and thus the price of cigarettes had a fairly large effect on consumption (0.13-0.82% less cigarettes consumed for every 1% price increase) [1]. Recently it has been debated to remove the VAT from vegetables and fruit to increase consumption of those.
The same logic is used for this book VAT exemption (which is good in my opinion) - I doubt we'll see the same effect though. Young people not reading is a complex problem to solve but books are really expensive to buy, so it's a good place to start.
[1] https://vidensraad.dk/sites/default/files/node/field_report_...
> the answer is technical inertia (or technical debt, if you will)
One of the issues. There are number of others. For example, VAT is a value-based tax. A VAT cut gives the biggest savings to people who spend the most. Since wealthier people typically spend more, they would save more money in absolute terms. For example, a family with a food budget of 3,000 kr. would save 300 kr., while a family with a food budget of 8,000 kr. would save 800 kr. Politically, some parties might prefer tax breaks that focused on lower-income groups.
Another issue, will the cost savings actually be passed on to the consumer?
VAT can be considered a regressive tax because the poorer I am, the more of my money I spend on goods and services, and the less on savings and investments. As a proportion of income, poor people spend more on VAT than rich people. I think it’s about double, in the UK. So you’re right that cutting VAT helps richer people more in absolute terms. But in terms of of quality of life it helps poorer people more.
[edit] assuming we’re talking about VAT on things that everyone buys. Which is why tax codes often exempt essential items from VAT.
Give people as a whole more money and they can spend it on housing. Given the decades long supply problem with housing it simply means rents increase to fill the void.
I was under the impression that VAT taxes are considered to impact mostly the poor. While in absolute terms the rich are impacted most, in percentage terms VAT is considered a much smaller portion of expenses for the rich than the poor. I quote: "VAT is a regressive tax, putting more burden to the poor than to the rich. Indeed, VAT applies the same rate to everyone regardless of their level of wealth – but the richer you are, the lower the proportion of your revenue goes to consumption."
In the U.K. most living expenses are don’t get charged vat, or get charged at a low rate - food, rent, public transport are vat free, electric, gas are low rated.
I find this logic extremely flawed. If you save half, you save half. If someone saves a lot more than you as a result, it mains they paid a lot more before, and is still paying a lot more than you now. As fair as it gets. Those that complain are usually imagining a robin-hood esque system where the tax progresses towards 100% as income goes up.
Trying to heavily tax billionaires is one thing, but the issue with them is tax avoidance by virtue of these complicated systems, and a lot of the incremental taxes land on people just plain working their ass off, getting no sleep, high stress and high blood pressure as a result. If someone has more because they worked more, they're entitled to exactly that.
Incremental tax also means that if you have a good year and a bad year you pay way more tax than if you just had two average years. Not to mention that such complicated tax is what enables tax optimization whereby those higher up can end up paying less tax. It's stupid.
Hmm. You say "tax break" but I could argue split VAT results in the opposite: a hike in consumption tax. The base VAT rate can be set higher if the VAT on desirable consumption is lower. I.e. it's not that rich people pay less tax for books -- it's that rich people pay more tax for non-books!
Note that while you have 25% VAT on things, actual VAT accounting is fully dynamic and banking and accounting systems handle this just fine.
On the incoming side, bills can come from other countries with an entirely arbitrary VAT value, so there the VAT value is recorded from the bill.
On the VAT refund side, arbitrary values are used even for Danish VAT, as companies can get full, fixed fraction or even entirely variable fraction if VAT refunded. For example, a company dinner can only be partially VAT refunded as you had private benefit of food, and VAT refund of an asset like a van is the set by the ratio of intended company vs private usage.
On the outgoing side, most banking and accounting systems would be prepared for other EU countries.
There's definitely going to be something hardcoded somewhere (including over 9000 times in the tax systems themselves), but the point is that VAT is already a dynamic size.
Insane that technical debt and general incompetency in software can produce such unexpected side effects.
That general incompetency you're referring to there can also be worded as
For years they didn't build unneeded complexity. And it sounds like for many more years to come. So they're just efficient. Any developer will have had to make things configurable afterwards, that's fine, just evolution of code.
Hard coding also means that it's less likely to break. No customer (in Denmark) can influence this, so why make it configurable?
Over time this does become a problem when source code is lost/companies go under.
Why the general incompetency added on?
Ad the other commenter wrote: The 25% is assumed - this has nothing to do with competence but to what level an assumption is true.
Everybody can point fingers at 25 year old code and call the developers incompetent because surrounding requirements have changed.
Considering that's 25 year old code I'd expect at least a
and not hardcoded values all around the source code. However I don't expect a table (db table, array, etc) of product categories with their own VAT code or a user defined exception list. That extra code would inevitably add bugs that are not worth the trouble. Adding an exception for books probably requires an update of the apps.Such a constant would be no better -- they don't want to change the VAT rate across all product types.
The code missing is that for per-product type variation in VAT rate, which sounds complicated enough that Iawould expect a good engineer to shrug and say YAGNI until it's actually necessary.
VAT is not a compile-time value. It's a runtime value. Nevermind not scattering it in your code, it shouldn't be in your code at all.
VAT rate can and does change. As such it can be different on different dates. And this change might not even correspond to change of year. So it really has no place in code.
> and call the developers incompetent
Why would you blame developers for this?
This is management problem!
So if the House introduced a 'fixed' VAT tomorrow, say $1, not proportional to the price of the product, would that not break most software used to compute VATs?
We have to make assumptions. Good software doesn't account for every future possiblity, but it is easy to change when the requirements change.
What is the primary reason for hard-coding these kinds of things? Gotta imagine CScientists would have debated this during the design phase. I have some hypotheses, are any of these right?
* correctness/verifiability analyses
* security? in compiled tools (prevent malicious re-configuration)
* an assumption of the inertia of law
* general incompetence/naivete
???
There's absolutely no reason to hard-code the value. That's just bad programming.
However you can't expect programmers to predict all possible future compatibility.
In my country VAT has a current rate. That rate can, and has, changed. But we have one rate. Some goods are exempt, but products have a VAT yes/no field.
Perhaps in the future the system will change. One possible change is that VAT attracts different % for different products. I'm not predicting that, or coding for it now. VAT rules could change to anything- I can't code against that.
The real problem is actually less the exact rate of 25%, but rather that most of the systems only assume one rate. Denmark was the first country to introduce a general VAT in 1967, and whilst the rate has changed (last in 1992 to 25%), the number of rates have not. So lowering the general VAT rate would likely be possible in a 1-3 year time frame (depending on unknown factors), but lowering the general VAT rate would be a significant loss on state finances (thus not interesting to politicians) (and as someone else pointed out, it mostly favours high spenders, which is also politically dicey).
However, introducing a split rate would definitely require a time frame of at least 4 years, and no politician are willing to wait that long for a politician win.
> The real problem is actually less the exact rate of 25%, but rather that most of the systems only assume one rate.
This can’t be the case.
You have to apply the VAT of their own country to customer from other part of the union and you don’t collect VAT when you sell to professionals.
In all likelihood, most systems in Danemark already supports using different VAT for different products.
Imagine the complexity of correctly accounting for a VAT when rates vary dependin on product type -- and doing it across an entire national economy! I'm glad they don't support that for as long as they don't have to.
Is it doable? Sure. Does it need resources that could be more fruitfully applied elsewhere? Probably.
Funnily enough only EU country with no reduced rates on some products is Denmark. So pretty much any system used in other countries already takes this in account.
Now VAT is 12% on Tuesdays. Did you "hard code" that VAT is constant across weekdays? The naivite..
Germany uses 7% VAT on books and a few other things (taxi rides, food). 19% is the regular VAT tariff. But going out for food and drinks is still reasonably affordable here compared to other EU countries (and never mind the UK and US where this is super expensive). I buy a lot of ebooks as well.
I'm definitely a bit price sensitive. For me the sweet spot is around 10 euros. Anything above is kind of a big expense and I'll think twice. But a book priced around 7 euros I'll just buy it even if I'm not 100% sure if I'll like it. I might be reading a lot less if those prices were creeping up. So, I can see how this might help more Danes get more into reading.
Reading books is something that high school erodes as a pleasurable activity (by making you read the wrong stuff). I got back into reading after high school when I was again able to read what I wanted and when I wanted again but not everybody does that. I was actually reading a lot before going to high school.
I expect that the Danish educational system might be hammering the fun out of reading in a similar way. Getting kids to read is easier if you give them the right books. If you've ever seen a small kid completely absorbed in a book you know what I'm talking about. I was like that. Force feeding kids dreary literary works is not necessarily the best way to get people into reading. The main learning that re-enforces in kids is that apparently they don't like reading. It's counter productive.
And of course the elephant in the room here is that Denmark is not a big country and that there are probably only so many Danish authors actually worth reading. A good benchmark would be counting the ones that get translated and have an international audience. The same is true in the Netherlands. Only a handful of authors that publishers consider worth translating. And of course the education system puts a lot of emphasis on a handful of native authors that the rest of the world would never have heard about.
I fully agree with you that forced "literature" lessons suck the fun out of reading. As someone who had to go through it in the Netherlands I've sworn off Dutch authors in response, and haven't read Dutch literature for over 2 decades.
What is people doing instead of reading? Social media is designed to be extremely addictive. It taps also on teenagers fears of failing to fit in.
I love HN for being a place for discussion. But most social media is a one way trend setting communication. Miss it and you are out of touch with everybody else. And it moves fast.
What people need is time for themselves with their own thoughts. That creates the opportunity to read and do other things. A phone that requires 100% of your attention span does not allow for that. And big tech puts billions on tracking and data gathering to better know what keeps people hooked and dependent.
> The latest education report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) raised alarm in Denmark when it found 24% of Danish 15-year-olds cannot understand a simple text, up four percentage points in a decade.
So, in 2015, 20% of 15-yo could not understand a simple text. Isn't that unbelievably high?
In 2015 (or some other year), they calculated the bottom quintile (or maybe quartile) score of students on some reading assessment, declared this to be the lowest level of reading competency, and wrote a helpful explanation that people who score at the lowest level of reading competency struggle with simple texts. But there's no single simple text that you could point to where people below the threshold completely fail to understand it and people above the threshold easily breeze through.
Because reading competency isn't binary like that. Reading competency is binary in that complete illiterates cannot read at all and people who aren't complete illiterates typically can read quite a lot, but there probably aren't enough actual illiterates in Denmark to produce scary-sounding statistics. So instead you get arbitrary thresholds that don't mean what they claim to mean.
Problem: 15 year olds don't know how to read. Solution: Make books 25% cheaper.
Sure, it can't hurt, but are those kids or their parents gonna go out and buy books, and then, you know, learn how to read?
I wonder what the numbers are like in the US...
This article[0], which covers the same but in Danish has more details. It mentions Sweden lowering their book VAT in 2001 to 6%. The takeaway was that more books were sold, but to people who were already buying books. Getting new readers thus requires an additional effort than merely lowering the cost.
[0] https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/regeringen-vil-afskaffe-mo...
Back then there were only linear tv and no social media. I know in my social circles back then in Sweden it was even trendy to read and lots of discussions between friends and even during family events between the teenagers about books. So yes it was a totally different landscape back then.
Not good and not improving https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-...
>Make books 25% cheaper.
Nitpick, but it's actually only making books 20% cheaper; 100/125 = 0.8 (80%).
True, but also there is a commonly accepted rule in economics where taxing something disincentivizes consumption of that thing. Usually when you lift taxes on something you will see a rise in consumption on that thing. But it remains to be seen if the 15 year olds in this situation will be the ones to consume more of it.
They need to legalize the possession of birretudas:
https://w.ouzu.im/lit/birretuda
Seriously though, I think the problem is not so much the particular tax on books (though this measure would help) but the way those taxes are computed.
This is just a dumb idea, but if a company or a person has X amount of money to put into a product that then can be sold in essentially free-to-produce copies at a Y price, and then a consumer spends an amount of time Z consuming it, then there should be a tax computed on those three variables X, Y, Z. The idea being that huge actors with high X can end up having a lot of Z. And Z is citizen time, which is dangerous to let it be captured by the interests of big capital in detriment to the interests of lesser capital and other people. But I guess that sounds too socialist :-( .
I cannot believe there are people who expect the government to solve every problem when they can't even stop themselves from causing problems left right and centre. Even a child would make the correct inference that taxing books at 25% would not have a positive impact on reading rates. Boggles the mind really.
They tax everything at 25%. They just added an exception for books.