EU Tax

Austria is encouraging the EU to raise funding via a direct EU tax, rather than the current more indirect methods of creaming a slice off of VAT reciepts and the money from import tarrifs (which kind of shows why the EU as a whole seems so protectionist against the outside world, if it where more free market then the EU Eurocrats would get less cash to waste).

The areas that are proposed for this tax are short-term financial transactions or international aviation. Nicely invisible to normal voters, except when they try to get a cheap flight and can't (assuming that the Delayed Boarding regulations hasn't killed off all no frills airlines already), or see the value they get from banking suddenly drop.

What do they have against aviation? There where the Delayed Boarding regulations that mean a no frills airline could end up paying a delayed passenger several hundred pounds when there ticket only cost a few tens of pounds (or less). The Gallileo stealth tax, forcing airlines to use the commercial Gallileo signal for navigation. Even though by the time the Gallileo constelation is all up (having cost far more to get there than was first thought) the free US GPS signal will be just as accurate. And now perhaps a direct tax on aviation. Don't they understand that cheap airfares have done more to unite the peoples of Europe and let them explore the glorious diversity of this continent than the EU ever has. Or perhaps they do, and don't like being reminded so want to kill off this irritation that you can acheive the purported goals of the EU with simple free markets better than regulation and centralised planning. Or perhaps they are just money grubbing incompetents. Yes that sounds more like it.