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Comment by Pawka | Hacker News Reader

Sounds insane. But what is more surprising to me - is why dolls were taxed differently than other toys. At first glance, it looks like stupid rules force to play silly games.

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Some trade war from the XIX century or something? Or maybe because dolls were historically thought for girls?

Possibly, bisque and china dolls were often imported from Germany.

In India, the pizza base has a different tax rate than the topping and so some restaurants will have two separate lines on your pizza bill - one for the base at 5% tax and another for the topping at 18% tax.

The tax on popcorn is also totally crazy. "Unpackaged and unlabelled popcorn with salt and spices is categorised as 'namkeen' and taxed at 5%. Pre-packed and labelled ready-to-eat popcorn attracts a 12% GST rate. Caramelized popcorn with added sugar is taxed at a higher rate of 18%."

Luxury vs premium vs ‘esssential’ at work eh?

All those make sense and are pretty common: bread is taxed lower than most pizza toppings.

Raw ingredients are taxed less than ready-to-eat or sugar-coated ultra-processed good. And I'm totally ok with that.

But a pizza as a whole is a ready-to-eat good. And a pizza isn’t a pizza without the crust.

What I think is happening is that the place is specifically charging different tax rates for each part of the pizza. That does seem odd but the alternative would be to tax the whole of the pizza at a higher tax rate than the one presented. Example, most countries might put a whole pizza at, say, 10% VAT, while here part of it is at, say, 4% and the rest at 10%. Ideally that's cheaper.

The pizza thing seemed incredibly silly to me. Surely the restaurant has already paid the tax when they bought the raw ingredients? Must any product served in a restaurant be taxed according to the rate of the most highly taxed ingredient in it, regardless of proportion?

So I looked it up. And yes, that is exactly the case, and it's an absurd situation that is causing massive headaches.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-63281037

This. It’s a pretty reasonable answer to a stupid question. Dolls depict people.

Probably lobbying from a local doll maker

did you get a second glance? did you figure out why they are taxed differently?

Sadly no..., I browsed quickly and found this post https://slate.com/business/2011/12/are-mutants-human.html which leads to a dead link to the podcast. Did not listen to the podcast (yet).

I also expected somebody from this community to enlight me :)

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