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Friday 8 November 2019

The Tampon Tax

The 20% VAT on tampons has been called "the Tampon Tax", and has sometimes been blamed on the EU. The theory is that, if we leave the EU, then we can have zero tax n tampons.

Nice theory, but untrue.

Germany has just decided to cut the VAT on tampons from 19% to 7%. Many other EU countries already use a lower tax rate for tampons.  We always could have done the same.

So why is the 20% tax rate blamed on the EU?

I don't know. But many other things are blamed on the EU, such as immigration from Pakistan, the rules for kippers that Boris claimed were eu (are actually UK rules).

In the past it has been very convenient for politicians and newspapers to blame anything they don't like on the EU, whether that's correct or not.

Now we're reaping the penalty for these lies. And when we've left the EU, who will the politicians blame for their mistakes?

The EU, of course.

4 comments:

  1. It is because the EU is run by a bunch of C**TS

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  2. It's easy to blame the EU especially if you don't take the time to understand history. The UK begged to be let into the EU because it was on its knees.


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    https://www.ft.com/content/202a60c0-cfd8-11e5-831d-09f7778e7377

    Britain joined what was then the European Economic Community in 1973 as the sick man of Europe. By the late 1960s, France, West Germany and Italy — the three founder members closest in size to the UK — produced more per person than it did and the gap grew larger every year. Between 1958, when the EEC was set up, and Britain’s entry in 1973, gross domestic product per head rose 95 per cent in these three countries compared with only 50 per cent in Britain.

    After becoming an EEC member, Britain slowly began to catch up. Gross domestic product per person has grown faster than Italy, Germany and France in the more than 40 years since. By 2013, Britain became more prosperous than the average of the three other large European economies for the first time since 1965.

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  4. (The above was directed to Anonymous, Not Solly who understands these things!)

    Mythbusting:

    Did the EU cost Britain £55m a day?

    Many Eurosceptics rage against the UK’s annual £18bn transfer to the EU. Nigel Farage has claimed that being in the bloc costs Britain £55m a day more than £20bn a year. But the UK’s net transfer to the EU falls far short of such claims.

    A rebate secured by Margaret Thatcher in 1984 reduced the bill and London sent £13bn to Brussels in 2015. Against that, the UK received £4.5bn from the EU in regional aid and agricultural subsidies, and the private sector received a further £1.4bn direct from the EU budget.

    That takes the net cost of membership to about £7bn, less than half a per cent of national income about £260 a year for each British household.

    Another often-quoted figure the reported £33bn cost of regulation comes from an impact assessment by Open Europe, a think-tank, of 100 EU rules. But it is based on only one side of the balance sheet.

    Even though he does not like many of these regulations, Raoul Ruparel, the think-tank's co-director, says the benefits of the regulations are much higher than the costs and clearly not all of [the costs] would disappear after Brexit.

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