Jimbo44

The license fee should definitely be scrapped. Australia and New Zealand for example which followed the BBC model (ABC and NZBC respectively) scrapped TV license fees decades ago. The licenses may have made sense in the early days of TV when only a relatively few, relatively wealthy people owed television sets. Having the few pay for a service the majority had no access to had some logic. But once nearly everyone owned a TV the logic was gone and the fees became an anachronism. Fees are inefficient to collect and enforce and are regressive (at a fixed annual fee the costs proportionately fall more heavily on those of lower incomes) so it became much preferred to collect the costs of public broadcasting from general taxation. There are no additional collection and enforcement costs this way and those who can afford to pay more do so through the higher taxes they pay.