Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the proposed Tourist Tax. We have discussed this a little bit in other videos even in some of my op-ed videos. I don't think it's a great idea to really introduce a Tourist Tax at this time, let's get some tourists back before we start worrying about taxing anybody. 

This is still being talked about. I suspect it will come online at some point, it just kind of feels like the momentum is there. That being said, I have seen things like this fall away in the past as well. But the question posed by this video is "what would it be used for?" I have kind of been thinking thought that myself. I got to thinking about it kind of in earnest when I read a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that's pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Future insurance requirements for foreigners entering Thailand still muddled. Quoting directly: "A final confusion is the again delayed 300 Baht Tourist Tax on foreign arrivals of which 50 Baht would go into an insurance slush fund for foreigners. The scheme has been widely misunderstood as a bond to fund foreigners receiving treatment in hospital but it is in fact a much more modest bank rolling of compensation for international tourists who die in unusual circumstances such as transport accidents. The published details say nothing of routine hospitalization or any cash for operations, mishaps or COVID illnesses. At best, the Government scheme would provide some limited cover for out-of-pocket hospitals to bid in a handful of controversial cases which risk harming the country's reputation." So yeah, I don't know about the latter part of that quote but as far as not really knowing yeah, it has been a real vague thing what this is going to be used for. Well it is kind of a vague thing what any tax is ever going to be used for in my opinion. I always find it funny they come up with taxes "oh it's such and such surcharge tax or the sales tax". I always find it funny they always feel the need to title the tax itself and then nobody ever seems to ask, "well what is the tax being used for?" I think the title of the tax should be what we are using it for. So if the tax was called, okay "we are going to build a school tax", I would say, okay we took the money, we built the school, why do we still need this? That being said, once you impose a tax it never seems to go away. 

They have been talking about a Tourist Tax going back a long way back, back before 2019, back into 2018. We did videos on this when they proposed it before. It remains to be seen exactly how it is going to be implemented. It definitely remains to be seen how they are going to use it. I think right now we should be way more worried about getting some tourists than worry about assessing some tax.