Scott Santens

Yeah.

I think if that tax is a very effective way of, uh, of getting the revenue, um,

coming from this in a way that both works and is effective and it's indirect.

I mean, I like that you, with a VAT tax, the amount that you pay into it is the amount that you choose to pay into it.

So it's based on your consumption.

If you're like a wealthy billionaire or something and you're choosing to not spend all this money on consumer goods and you're instead saving and investing it, then you aren't paying a lot into that because you're just paying for basics or whatever.

But if you're like a billionaire and you're just spending on everything and the economy is really...

doing a lot for you because you're consuming such a good high percentage of what the economy is producing, then you pay more into it.

And that only seems to make sense.

It's certainly possible.

But at the same time, there is competitive interest involved here so that you do not want to raise your prices if you don't have to.

And so this could mean that instead of, let's say, Amazon passing on, let's say, $5 onto something that costs $50,

And lower that price to say, you know, if they wanted to eat the entire thing, say like, you know, 45 or around there, pass that on so that the consumer ends up still paying $50 instead of $55, even though the 10% tax is actually added on.

It really depends on competition.

And we also see in Europe, too, that around on average about half of the VAT is passed on and about half is absorbed.

And we also have seen something very similar to that happen just recently with all the tariffs that Trump applied to a bunch of goods.

And we saw that these companies did not want to pass that on to consumers.

They wanted to try to eat as much of that as they could.

Because again, they have a competitive market.

They don't want to lose that competitive edge by increasing those prices.