{"id":252760,"date":"2014-04-29T21:51:59","date_gmt":"2014-04-29T17:51:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=252760"},"modified":"2014-04-29T21:52:43","modified_gmt":"2014-04-29T17:52:43","slug":"armenia-cant-give-tax-preference-to-wine-over-vodka-because-of-threats-from-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2014\/04\/29\/armenia-cant-give-tax-preference-to-wine-over-vodka-because-of-threats-from-russia.html","title":{"rendered":"Armenia Can&#8217;t Give Tax Preference to Wine Over Vodka Because of Threats from Russia?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n\t<span style=\"line-height: 1.6em;\">Armenian National Congress MP Hrant Bagratyan in parliament today proposed a legislative amendment to eliminate the excise tax on wine production in order to develop the industry. Bagratyan, an economist and former prime minister of Armenia, said that Armenia being a &quot;grape homeland&quot; has become a vodka-drinking country as the latter is cheaper.&nbsp;<\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\t&quot;We are forcing Armenia into becoming a vodka-drinking country. A grape homeland drinks vodka &mdash; we drink vodka because we are poor,&quot; he said.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tAccording to him, grapes are cheap in Armenia, thus the cost price of wine is low, but a bottle of wine is sold for at least 1,600 AMD (about $3.80 USD), where 1,100 AMD ($2.66) is the cost of the bottle, label, and cork. Thus, Bagratyan is proposing to apply excise tax only on the contents and not the entire bottle.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tHead of the Standing Committee on Economic Affairs, Republican Party of Armenia MP Vardan Ayvazyan, in turn, said he&#39;d like to be honest and say in parliament that to take any steps against Russian vodka will be dangerous in Armenia.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\t&quot;They openly said, if you put restrictions on our vodka, tomorrow you won&#39;t bring [export] your cognac,&quot; he said.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tIn order to help local wine producers Ayvazyan suggested instead of legislative amendments to appeal to bankers with the request to provide loans with low interest rates to villagers.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tAyvazyan added this issue can be discussed in the future.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Armenian National Congress MP Hrant Bagratyan in parliament today proposed a legislative amendment to eliminate the excise tax on wine production to&#8230;<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":185664,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[18073,14180,13402,12880],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252760"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}