IcaroRibeiro said:
You meant high taxes right? We use "Custo Brasil" to talk about high cost in production taxes, labor taxes and commerce and services taxes. This makes goods here extremely expensive, even for basic things like food in grocery stores. Custo Brasil is definitely a thing and give a headache to any lower/middle class worker who spend over 80% of their income in consumer items, meaning the absolute majority of our wages are taxed from one way or another "Lucro Brasil" is used to criticize the exploitation of some companies to elevate selling price as much as they can only for the sake of profit. In specific automotive industry is know for their infamous retail prices for subpar products Apple does this here too, selling price for iPhone and MacBooks are unrealistic high even with all taxes involved, they used sell MacBooks for over 15k BRL even when exchange rate was 3 BRL = 1 USD, so yeah 5k USD for a freaking personal computer Sony tried with PS4, even with exchange rates and taxes it shouldn't be priced over 3000 BRL, but retail price at launch was 4000 BRL. Didn't work that well for them and they lowered the price a bit |
I mean everything. High taxes don't elevate the price that much. High operating costs courtesy of unscrupulous middlemen also add to the price, together with the aforementioned "Lucro" that you just highlighted. I once talked to an ex-boss of mine about why bananas were so expensive in Spain and the answer was a breakdown of costs and tax: tax raised prices, but the amount of checkups they had to go through, some repetitive or redundant, added extras to the cost that weren't needed.
OTOH, red tape and taxes are also considered to be one and the same, so taxing everything to kingdom come is also red tape and yes, I heard horror stories about taxation down there. I still wonder WHERE that money is going and if the politicians pocketing it are aware they could double that amount by slashing retail taxes and taxing the upper echelons out of their billions.
