Portugal to tax eliquid at 60 cents per millilitre

[Sly Pandemia]

The government justifies its widening of the tax net "for reasons of public health as well as tax equity, since they are products that are presented as substitutes for tobacco."


You couldn't make this up. Take a product for which a major selling point is that it's NOT tobacco. Assert that by being so emphatically not tobacco, it must be a tobacco substitute. Therefore it should be regulated like tobacco, and taxed accordingly. Because it's not fair on the tobacco companies that certain products evade tobacco tax simply because they aren't tobacco. Claim that this is also good for public health because we know how bad for you tobacco is and obviously this extends to stuff which isn't tobacco too.


By this logic they could heavily tax mineral water because it's a vodka substitute.

 

[Chegs]

I was reading an engineering newsletter earlier,I found an article stating that due to lack of investment(no chunt has any money now,even billionaire industrialists)some of the Wave Power electricity generating experimental plant was going into administration.
Pelamis Wave Power enters administration | News | The Engineer

Funding remains an issue for the marine energy sector, largely as a result of a pullback in venture capital and private equity capital flowing into cleantech. Riskier innovation plays have been hit the hardest by the paucity of institutional capital.

Read more: Siemens hunts for buyer to take on Marine Current Turbines | News | The Engineer

I refuse to believe that 2+ million smokers switching to vaping has reduced the governments income so drastically that they can't afford to give us a fucking break & cease persecuting vapers as "it looks like smoking"

I could be convinced though,that 2+ million vapers reduce profit for the (previously safe) investors in tobacco meaning there isn't the cash to spend on investing in alternative technology.As not just BAT etc make their money grow,financial institutions also invest pension funds into tobacco as this has always been a staple good returning commodity.

I'm no financial wizard though,I left school on my arse as soon as it was legal for me to be booted out without so much as a timetable of WHEN the exams were let alone a piece of paper proving I passed any qualification.The above is just me interpreting various interweb pages in my own way(though the part about pension funds was gleaned from the local paper reporting on our local council bleating about their lack of money to pay staff wages)