There's to be a Constitutional Court episode unfolding in Germany, and it centers on the public TV tax (17.99 Euro per month, per house or apartment).
The court hearing? It'll be today (16 May) and tomorrow. Basically a questions round.
The case? Four individuals (one is a company) are suing in court that the public TV tax is 'unfair'. Part of this group of cases (rounded up into one hearing) centers on fairness (as written into the German Constitution). For example, if you don't watch TV...is this current method (since 2013) fair?
As for the decision over the four cases? Oh, this could take an entire year....or maybe just a couple of months.
Generally, if you bumped into a hundred Germans.....each has an opinion on the TV tax. I would suggest that age plays a major role in how you view it.
My son (27 years old) and most all younger Germans....are negative about the tax. I would suggest that 90-percent of the youth in Germany marginally, if ever, watch public TV. In my son's case, it's now over an entire decade since he watched it.
In the case of Germans over the age of fifty....there's not a single day that most (probably 90-percent) don't watch something off the various public TV networks.
So even if the court sides with the TV tax folks.....there's this problem brewing and likely to become a a major deal in the next decade. You will reach a point where a fair sum of people are fed up, and some political party (probably NOT the CDU or SPD folks).....will have a platform to dismantle the public TV tax and rebuild the whole public network system.....downsizing it drastically. And this group of younger voters will vote for that party to carry out the 'mission'.
How big a problem is this? Well....I think a majority of Germans would tell you it's nowhere in their top 200 worries, but then they hate the idea of the talk of the tax going up (something very likely by 2020, and rumors suggest 20.00 Euro a month will be the target). That's 240 Euro a year (if the increase does occur).
Restructuring the TV folks? The journalists would be throwing themselves on the floor in a major tantrum and getting highly emotional about the unfairness.
So settle back and be entertained.
2 comments:
So is this TV tax like a monthly license similar to the TV license in the UK? Since neither the US nor Canada have ever had TV licenses, I am curious of the details.
According to this Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence), in some countries, including Germany, you have to pay to listen to public radio. Do Germans have to pay for each individual radio-equipped vehicle as well, or does the home license cover that already? Can the same be said about portable radios and handheld televisions too?
The old system that the Germans used...bean-counted every TV and radio (even car radios). About eight years ago, they discussed a radical change, and just inventing a standard of one residence fee (house or apartment, it wouldn't matter). About 90-percent of Germans were acceptable to this. The negative is if you own a second apartment, a cabin, or other house.
Then to stir the pot even more...it wasn't a TV/radio tax anymore....it was a 'media' tax, which meant if you had a smart-phone, a boom-box, a laptop, a computer, etc....that was included in the business. Naturally, a lot of younger folks don't have TVs anymore, and they use strictly laptops and computer access, and they were extremely anti-public TV (my son will confess having watched NO public TV for ten years now). No one cites numbers, but I would take a guess that one-third of the public either watches only commercial TV, absolutely no TV, or downstreams (Netflix) only. And that number increases yearly.
So there are three things converging here over the next decade. First, the fee has to go up (maybe two Euro a month). Second, more people are not watching public TV, and they will force a political issue. Third, there's this growing demand that the public TV empire downsize (something that hasn't ever occurred in the history of public TV in Germany).
On the critical and skeptical nature of German TV...I lean more than most. I tend to grasp my son's point, if he doesn't use it, then why pay for it? Getting out of this though, is tough because if you have an internet connection...you fail right away and they can say you downstream their stuff. They even went and created a fairly lame youth-orientated public network to claim to the political folks that they are tuned into what youths watch. So you'd only get out of this, if you were TV-less, and zero internet/radio. There are some Germans like this but I doubt if there's more than 5,000 across the whole nation.
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