A lawmaker is planning to introduce Bill that would tax people for having to many gadgets.
PBA Party-list Rep. Mark Aeron Samberg is one of the proponents of the bull, which he says will generate additional income for the government.
“We need cellphones but we don’t need five or six cellphones or 10 cellphones. That’s the aim of this bill, it’s just to prevent people from buying too much on a certain product and at the same time generating income for the government,” Sambar said.
While there is no set plan in place to track people’s purchases of gadgets, Sambar proposes that a person’s TIN, or tax identification number could be utilized to identify people buying excessive gadgets. If a person does not go over the amount of allowed number of gadgets, he/she can get a tax refund from the BIR by bringing their official receipts.
Not to rain on Sambar’s parade here, but we think there’s other, more constructive ways of producing additional cash for the government. His proposal will prove difficult to implement, and may end up costing more money to run than it is designed to bring in. Setting up servers to track purchases via TIN will be a nightmare, since cashiers and point-of-sale terminals will have to be connected together to create the network. There’s alos a question of how much is too much? Who sets the arbitrary number of how many gadgets is too much for a single person?
