This thread at Slashdot exhibits typical Slashdotter outrage at an IMF proposal to tax SMS messages in the Phillipines.  My read is that this is actually a very sensible proposal from the IMF.

Like many crony capitalist, industrializing countries, the Phillipines suffers from a massive tax evasion problem: 

For the current year, tax revenues are expected to be 9.8 per cent of the gross domestic product - down from 15.8 per cent of the GDP in 1997 - in part because businesses have not been remitting over 40 per cent of the value-added taxes they owe... As per estimates made, the country loses about US$8 billion (S$14 billion) a year due to tax evasion.

I'm the last person to say that more taxes are the solution to anything BUT, that doesn't mean we can't discuss the merits of a particular tax scheme.   In this case, the Phillipines needs a scheme to reliably collect tax revenue in an environment where enforcement is difficult to non-existent. 

All Tax schemes are at some level arbitrary impositions.    There is nothing "natural" about sales or income taxes other than the fact that they existed before many of us were born.  For the Phillipines, we need to construct a tax solution that:

• has intrinsic, broad-based "revenue chokepoints" -- telcos are a place where the activity of a large % of population naturally coalesce;   The enforcement spotlight only needs to be shown on a small number of organizations relative to other taxes.   This is where the analogy to the "Email Tax Hoax" breaks down -- email is a fundamentally more distributed system administration-wise.
• easily meterable activity -- unlike proposals to raise corporate & personal income taxes, SMS's are by their nature very discrete events and therefore far easier to measure and enforce than accounting-related measures.  Cronies will have a very hard (although not impossible) time distorting actual "consumption" of SMS.
• touch discretionary income -- unlike generalized sales taxes which can affect the poor and their consumption of staples like food, SMS messaging - despite the advertising - is still a fundamentally discretionary activity.   If the price paid by the individual of an SMS message increases, the end user has the ability to proportionately decrease consumption

Additionally -- and I'm no general fan of the IMF -- I think the IMF is filling a very important role in this situation.   Taxing SMS is clearly an unpopular proposal but there are situations where the government needs an extra shove to take bad medicine.   The IMF is providing the shove.