Two basic approaches, not mutually exclusive: 1) make advertising expenditure non-deductible or weaker version treat as investment, make deduction multi-year reducing NPV 2) directly tax ad revenue, strength depends on rate.
My motivation is treating ads as mental pollution and force for centralization and monopoly, not preventing election manipulation. Complaints abut the latter are nothing but extreme hypocrisy coming from the US.
> How would taxing ads be different than just taxing corporations?
Without commenting on the wisdom or relevance of the proposal, this seems really simple. Taxing activities disincentivizes them, so you could expect a tax on a specific activity to have the first order effect of reducing that activity.
My motivation is treating ads as mental pollution and force for centralization and monopoly, not preventing election manipulation. Complaints abut the latter are nothing but extreme hypocrisy coming from the US.