| There should be a high sales tax on all advertising. It's the perfect thing to tax: - Luxury product companies advertise the most (utilities rarely do). The tax will decrease consumption of the most economically "unnecessary" - Advertisers charge more money to show ads to rich people than on poor people - even a flat % tax will naturally impact the rich more than the poort - Prices are set by auction at the maximum of the advertisers willingness to pay - this means tax revenue will hit the supplier of ads not the buyer - Tax on ads is fundamentally a tax on consumption not income - It's a zero sum positional product - ads make use of finite physical space/attention. This is close to a negative externality that people cannot contract away (eg i cannot contract the billboard company to not show me ads for $5/mo). On the web, this could technically be done, but the marginal value is so low and the number of billboard providers so high that transaction costs prevent it from happening I am actually willing to have space ads if there were a super high tax on it. Imagine to show a message to all of humanity for a week, you must first pay $100B of taxes to all of humanity. That might be worth it. I've been surprised there's less discussion of advertising taxes than much more complicated things like land value taxes, even though advertising/marketing is 1/5th of GDP in developed markets. |