I was about to call that the Rundfunkbeitrag is not legally a tax (Steuer), but a tax (Beitrag). For some reason that difference does not seem to exist in English and it translates to the same word??
It doesn't matter if it's masquerading as a license fee, it's by all means a tax - it's required by law and you go to jail if you do not pay it and you have to pay it even if you don't want to consume their content.
In France we used to have the "Redevance audiovisuelle" which just like in German didn't use the same word. It was removed in 2022 but according to Wikipedia[1], this is what Germany is using. The french version has a European maps with the different sources of financement used in European TV broadcasting services.
Beitrag Wikipédia pages are available in other languages, namely Swedish and Esperanto. The meaning doesn't exactly match German's.
A specific "tax" just for TV/radio exists in many European countries, definitely not just Germany. And in general, there are many tax-like things out there where it's mandatory to pay them in specific circumstances and they go to a specific use.
I'd translate "Beitrag" literally to "contribution", maybe add a "mandatory" as qualifier.
The key difference is that taxes are completely under discretion of parliamentary control, whereas the Rundfunkbeitrag is under discretion of the individual broadcast authority governance boards (which are too closely tied to politicians for my comfort, but that's another thing).
Licence/License. (maybe like the BBC licence fee?)
Levy. (see below)
There is also the concept of the hypothicated tax. The only exemplar I know is the Australian Medicare levy, the money is solely to be used, and spent on Medicare, and no other purpose enshrined in law. People often claim petrol tax was designed to pay for roads infrastructure but it wasn't legally bound, and is not a hypothicated tax. Nor is the ULEZ and like costs to drive in the inner city with a petrol engine. They are designed to discourage use of ICE not to pay for them.
It doesn't exist because the distinction is meaningless. The government forcing you to pay money to a government (adjacent) institution is a tax for all practical purposes.
A Beitrag is bound to a well defined objective which means it is determined what the money will be used for at the moment it is collected whereas a Steuer contributes to the household as such.
Also, public TV is not controlled by the government but by a council that is more or less democratic. Still far from perfect, sure
> Also, public TV is not controlled by the government but by a council that is more or less democratic. Still far from perfect, sure
Of the countries I lived in, the quality of the broadcasting and reporting in Germany has been the better one so far.
And when you see the flow of vomit produced by most of the private television in the countries around, you realise that the compromise is not perfect, but it's nonetheless miles ahead of most other options.
You also quickly realise that most private channels are owned by powerful players pushing their own agenda, which can bring even more bias and one-sidedness.
Equivalent might be a bond paid by tax payers. The money collected is used only for a specific purpose, but you cannot avoid paying it. For me, a tax goes into a general fund that is budgeted for common use while a special purpose bond (or a tax) is money collected for a singular purpose and accounted as such.
The difference between Steuer and Beitrag is an artificial distinction that the German government has made in their laws. It has not much to do with the language itself. It's just that because German language is not used much outside Germany, official government terms and language basically get conflated.
If I’m understanding the concept correctly, in the USA we describe that kind of tax as “earmarked” which is a reference to folding the corner of a page in a book to mark your place.
> "Earmark" comes from the livestock term, where the ears of domestic animals were cut in specific ways so that farmers could distinguish their stock from others grazing on public land.
I think contribution is a much higher level word that is way too abstract to be useful in this context.
When I think of "Contributions" I think of a voluntary transfer of money, whether from an individual to an organization or from an individual to themselves (like "contributions" to an IRA or 401k for example). But a contribution could even be sharing ideas with a group of friends (contributing to the conversation) or anything really.
The key difference is that the government never touches the money anywhere between citizen and broadcaster, to avoid unwarranted influence. I assume that people who know the British term know that, as the German one is surely modeled after the BBC. I'm writing for other readers.
The downside is that it's a per head (or per household) sum, not coupled to income like taxes would be. This is usually explained away by the fee being separate from the state, but the reality is that Germany actually has it all implemented, in the form of the opt-in "church tax" coupled to taxable income just like regular tax. Handled by the tax office, but not going too government coffers. Would be so easy to extend the implementation to public broadcasting, because you don't pay to consume the media, you pay to live in an environment that is not dominated by profit-driven broadcasting media. There are many negative things to say about our public broadcasting, but when I look at other countries that don't have strong public broadcasting, it's so much the lesser evil, totally worth the fee.
(personally, I'd love to see that "church tax implementation" opened up to all kinds of opt-in membership organisations that would see value in income-coupled membership fees, I believe that a lot of good things could work that way, with people of all income levels enjoying an objectively fair way of contributing)
This often a complicated case regarding competition law. In our neoliberal world giving away something for free that was subsidized is often seen as destroying market. The national CIO of Germany at one time recommended public bodies to us copyleft (also the EC opted for EPL) , rather than putting it into public domain. I also like this idea. However, this is fundamentaly different from the US. The German weather service even had to shutdown some functions in their free app due to a court order.
As a loophole, they ended up making the app paid as not constitute disloyal competition, which, depending on the angle makes sense: you have a competitor that you can actually never compete because regardless of what they do, their funding never runs out. It’s not a fair battle. On the other hand tho, wetter online were crying like little kids about an app that was doing what a government was supposed to do.
I would rather have a model where anyone can contribute and can see the code, if they want to, than a model, where there is "competition" of who can make the shittiest but most profitable broadcast system.
Thanks, I strongly feel that publicy-funded software should be at least open source if not public domain, but the market impact is a wrinkle I hadn't considered before.
One would hope so, but they don't even open the shows for public use, they don't even keep them around so people can watch the things they had to pay for.
