Russia is Taxing Sins to Find Money

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Russia is running out of money.

[00:00:03]Oil prices spiked briefly thanks to the Iranian conflict, but even that wasn't enough to plug the hole in the country's budget.

[00:00:10]The war in Ukraine isn't going anywhere.

[00:00:13]It gets more expensive by the month. So, the government did what governments do when they've exhausted every other option, it went looking in its citizens' pockets. And that's where taxation became creative.

[00:00:27]There's an old joke about a tax on air.

[00:00:29]Well, they haven't got there yet, but they did introduce a tax on sugar. And trust me, that's just the start of it.

[00:00:36]We made a video about how this actually works. How three words quietly inserted in a thousand-page tax code wiped out an entire market overnight and left restaurants across the country facing tax bills they never saw coming.

[00:00:52]How Russia invented what can only be described as an unfriendly nation surcharge, a tax that nearly doubled the price of an entire industry's products simply because of where those products came from.

[00:01:04]We will tell you about how the Ministry of Health of a country of 140 million people officially came out against banning products it had declared harmful to human health.

[00:01:15]Why so? Well, it was counting on the tax revenue.

[00:01:19]The Ministry of Health.

[00:01:22]How the scheme works, how much money the state actually collected, and why raising taxes almost never means finding new money.

[00:01:31]It's all in the video, but where is it?

[00:01:33]There's just one problem. This channel has faced the cruelty of YouTube algorithms. No matter how relevant the topic or how much work goes into the research, YouTube keeps burying our videos between content that has absolutely nothing to do with what our audience actually watches.

[00:01:53]So, our new videos are going up on a new channel, a fresh start.

[00:01:58]Whether it works, we genuinely don't know. That part is up to you.

[00:02:03]So, find the link to our new video on our new channel [music] in the description and in the pinned comment.

[00:02:10]See you in the next one.