[bigdollopenergy]

Does this tax work actually work? Surely the amount of people who actually pay the tax is near 0 and they'd get far more tax revenue from a lower tax rate right? I'd actually bet that this tax in particular not only doesn't raise money, but is a net-negative tax-wise as you're forcing people to spend their incomes on flights/hotels out of the country they otherwise wouldn't and they probably buy other things on their trip too.

From living in Chicago these forms of taxes seem so counter-productive. The pattern seems to be that a budget needs to be balanced, so they come up with a new consumption tax that conveniently assumes that the level of consumption stays the same with the new tax in place, but it never ever does.

It's so frustrating because once a tax gets extreme enough that almost no one pays it, lowering/removing it would benefit everyone including the government. It's one of those rare things that can be fixed instantly at no effort/cost with only positive results, yet it won't get done.

[ericol]

I think taxes are utterly broken in this country. For starters this one "supposedly" is a tax for a special group of people (That is, those that for whatever reason spend money in foreign countries) but the reality is that a large group of Argentinians do shop outside of the country.

Besides that there's a huge discussions since a lot of years ago, because the amount of money you have to earn in order to start paying taxes is rather low, and they don't get updated often. Add to that inflation and the end result is a lot of people paying a lot of taxes (And the government being very lazy catching up updating those taxes).