I suppose in an age where we're used to being able to contact anyone from nearly anywhere with a cellphone and it's increasingly hard to find payphones, those might not be a "luxury" per se. And cellphones can be had for relatively cheap. But televisions? Nobody needs a television.
I'm not a luddite and I appreciate the things that technology enables for me, but I appreciate those things even more because I realize I don't need them.
Access to mass communication is a basic necessity in any democracy. People have to be able to inform themselves about current political topics if they are to take informed decisions.
As such all that’s needed to access that information is not a luxury item. I agree that nowadays it’s possible to inform oneself equally well if one can access the internet (and a newspaper subscription was always a possible substitute), but I think it would be wrong to privilege certain forms of access to information, not the least because certain forms of accessing information might be harder or easier to use for certain groups of people. Consequently privileging, say, internet access would potentially exclude certain people from the political process.
Mass media plays a central and important role in the democracy of any larger democracy. Its existence is vital and as many people as possible should have access to it.
I think you make an extremely important point. I largely agree with you, yet I don't think it's entirely cynical of me to think that if your primary source of data for making informed decisions is coming from television, you're (and we're all) still probably better off without it.
Who buys desktops anymore? They can pay sales tax.
Plus, if you really wanted to tax TV's and not computer monitors, they're usually different SKU's and accept different inputs. If it has HDMI, coax, or component inputs, tax it as a TV. VGA, DVI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, tax it as a monitor.
About 250 million people per year apparently. And for the next decade desktops are likely to continue to be sold to the tune of 200+ million units per year even when taking into account a sales decline.
The trend has turned very sharply towards laptops over the past 10-15 years. It's a moot point in any case as you can distinguish computer displays from televisions according to input format.
I'm not a luddite and I appreciate the things that technology enables for me, but I appreciate those things even more because I realize I don't need them.