Looks to me like a system ripe for hacking and fraud that will turn ordinary citizens into criminals.
The test setup is an electronics package outfitted with GPS, wireless internet, and a rating system algorithm that tracks the following things:
- The car’s environmental impact
- The distances driven,
- The route,
- The time it is driven
Supposedly, calculating all this together for a tax is a “fairer” way to assess the impact of the vehicle. Of course the whole idea is to discourage people from driving.
According to the article, the proposal will be introduced slowly as a replacement for the current car and gas tax, however it is most certainly controversial and will be a real test of how far environmentally savvy Dutch citizens will be willing to go to reduce the impact of the car.
Personally, I think it has FAIL written all over it since people really don’t want their personal vehicles to be like taxicabs with meters tracking everywhere you’ve driven. I wonder how long it will be before some citizen takes a hammer to the meter. The more tech savvy will just figure out a way to hack it or fool it.
Sitting behind this is the EU proposal to ‘overhaul the outdated rules’ on energy taxation in Europe. For ‘overhaul’ read ‘massively increase and spread the scope of’. There is no pretence at making this revenue neutral, every type of fuel sees an increase. See http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/excise_duties/energy_products/legislation/index_en.htm and http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/resources/documents/taxation/minima_explained_en.pdf . There is no reference in here to fairness, progressiveness, or what the taxes are to be used for.
Just remember that the government that imposes this kind of intrusive taxation is also the government that will vote themselves pay raises to help them pay for the new tax…
G. Karst says:
August 14, 2011 at 8:44 am
I would like the answer to one thing, today:
What is the maximum total tax rate that has been successfully imposed on the general population, WITHOUT causing riots and civilian revolt.
/end quote
In the UK under Harold Wilson (1960s) Income Tax went to 95% – yes really 95%, Admittedly not on ALL the income – just the Super tax band (no I don’t know how much it was; but it was the top step of many…)
In India in the 70’s anyone earning more then the resident/PM (can’t remember which) got hit for 100% tax on the ‘excess’. In fact for expatriate Indians the tax could go to 110%.. A number of UK shipping companies were in trouble with the ILO (International Labour Organisation – part of the UN) for not paying their (Indian) Crews enough; when the ILO were told it was to avoid 110% tax the ILO responded that the tax rate was not their problem; the underpayment was ! I seem to remember the problem was only resolved when India dropped her tax rates.
oops
In India in the 70′s anyone earning more then the resident/PM
should of course be
more then the President/PM
James of the West says:
August 13, 2011 at 10:20 pm
Fuel tax is a much more simple
A fuel tax falls apart as soon as you have any significant market penetration of electric or natural gas vehicles. Then there are issues as to the expense of building and maintaining different kinds of roads. Why should I pay a fuel tax that pays for a bridge that I never use?
If I look at my state’s DOT budget large sums of money are going into high cost projects that I will never drive on.
In Seattle they are building a $3 billion tunnel. I have no need to drive in Seattle…never mind a need to drive through a $3 billion dollar tunnel. Why should I being paying to build and maintain that tunnel via my fuel taxes?
Universal electronic tolling…bring it on. I’m not bothered having to contribute my fair share to maintain the roads that I drive on.
“The thing is that fuel duty and other transport taxes, at least in the UK and Oz, don’t go into funding maintenance and construction, and I don’t think they have for years. ”
If I remember correctly, roughly 20% of motoring taxes in the UK actually get spent on roads.
Tolling won’t replace the curent tax regime. The problem, Harry, is that now they’ll get both taxes.
RE: “fairer” way to assess the impact of the vehicle …
What could be more “fair” that a simple tax per gallon? IF you drive a high MPG car, you are rewarded with lower gas and tax costs. IF you must drive the over-sized SUV, you pay more for gas and taxes. The best part is, you have a choice!!!!
Under their system, you first pay for some STUPID device and pay for some system to read the device in order to pay taxes. In order to make everything equal, it’s going to cost everyone a lot more. WHAT A DUMB SYSTEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Here’s the reason for it – sorry there are too many comments to read them all – but if nobody else has explained there is a simple reason behind this and it is the EU.
The EU has it’s own GPS system (Galileo) – when it was funded and established it was held out that it would become self-financing through people paying to use it. Ain’t gonna happen while free GPS exists. (As an aside the Chinese government have a stake in Galileo)
So the EU have been looking for ways to ‘create’ an income stream from their GPS and the first choice is from monitoring car movements. Needs a reason though as otherwise people would suspect it was all about tracking their every movement (and that may well be part of what the EU wants) so the UK tried testing the idea of using it to extract charges for road use at peak times – bad response from the public. Now the Dutch have come up with a novel explanation for an application of the EU’s GPS to tax according to car use, It’s only to raise revenue for the EU and of course as so many have pointed out there is already a foolproof system for taxing according to use – it’s known as Fuel Duty.
So when something appears nonsensical (which it is) look behind it for the real reason – if total stupidity is there then you can bet it is something to do with EU bureaucrats.
peter_dtm says:
August 14, 2011 at 8:39 am
” The conversation will go something like this :
(self) Some one paying 10% tax and earning £1000 pays more tax than some one earning £100 pounds ?
(socialist) but they pay the same % thats not fair; the rich should pay more
(self) but they do pay more; 10% of 1000 is 100; 10% of 100 is only 10
(socialist interrupting) see they both pay the same 10% they should be made to pay more
Yes I have had this conversation on several occasions with different people over the years (in different countries too!). ”
The point socialists never mention and the one missing here is that it is never about the amount of tax paid, it it always about income left over. Socialists and lower income people believe that it is not fair that someone who makes $1,000,000 and pays 35% tax still has $650,000 left to spend while those making only $50,000 and paying 15% tax only have $35,000 left to spend. That is the real reason they believe the rich need to pay more. Once you understand this you see they don’t give a damn about logic, fairness or equality. They are simply jealous and want to use the government to get other people’s stuff for themselves.
The answer is to get them to see that the only fair way to have more money left over after taxes is to increase their income and to not to rely on government to steal on their behalf.
Fred from Canuckistan says:
August 14, 2011 at 7:00 am
The Dutch love to be over regulated.
In Holland, if you wan to play golf you must pay serious coin to attend and graduate from a government licensed golf school.
Go figure.
A good thing then that I live in the Netherlands 🙂
But indeed to play golf on most golfcourses you need a handicapcard from the NGF (Nederlandse Golf Federatie = Dutch Golfing Federation) or one of its foreign sister-organisations. But that has nothing to do with the governement.
peter_dtm says:
August 14, 2011 at 9:51 am
Thanks for your reply, however, my simple question, remains unanswered.
I am not talking of windfall taxes, nor tax evasion penalty taxes, nor any one time contingency tax.
I am saying that there must be a theoretical limit on the general tax paid by the bulk of tax payers (ie middle class). Obviously, we cannot take 100% of a person’s income unless the state supplies 100% of a citizen’s consumption in all items, including luxury.
Can we, long term, tax the working man’s earnings at 80%, indefinitely, in a free society? What are the theoretical economic limits to taxation? I would think this would be well known amongst the various economical schools and paradigms. If so where are we (U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Germany) now? GK
Most tax relating to vehicles in Europe is fuel tax, hence UK prices of £1.40 x 1.60 x 3.8 = $8.50 per US gallon, similar across the EU. A rather easier method of taxing drivers on ‘environmental impact’.
There’s already a tax on how much one drives, it’s called fuel tax.
Love the press; hate how they adulterate and bastardize technology reporting.
From: FAA/Sat Nav News> (pdf file) we find:
See, you really don’t need to ‘install’ anything ground-based to use/to implement a GPS ‘landing system’ or landing aid, but, to assure enhanced accuracy and integrity monitoring for civil navigation at or in the vicinity of an aerodrome GBAS can be used (vs SBAS or Sat based augmentation system implemented via WAAS or Wide Area Augmentation System) to conform or augment basic GPS accuracy and reliability.
BTW, here is the verbiage from that same FAA/Sat Nav News> newsletter about the GPS interference dated Fall of 2010:
My read of that would indicate that this an ongoing situation with occasional jamming being ‘seen’ by traffic carrying/using jammers on the NJ Turnpike … there can also be incidental ‘jamming’ by unintentional sources and it would not surprise me if an occasional vehicle and attachment/trailer) emanated errant signals (e.g. motorhome with a collapsed ‘active’ or pre-amplifier-equipped TV antenna; I have tracked down one or two of those affecting UHF repeaters in the past. There have also been cases of GPS jamming attributed to these types of ‘active’ TV antennas – see report linked below.)
Ground Based Augmentation System:
GBAS – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNSS_Augmentation#Ground-based_augmentation_system
Coast Guard report:
GPS RECEIVER INTERFERENCE FROM ACTIVE TELEVISION ANTENNAS
.
Is there any environmental impact other than carbon dioxide? And don’t all of us here hold that carbon dioxide is completely harmless? So why are we wasting all this time on all this verbiage? Why don’t we concentrate on showing that the basic fact on which the whole AGW case rests is false, and do it often and widely enough to fix the problem once and for all? It’s not up to us to prove carbon dioxide is harmful – they have to prove it is, and no one ever has so far.
We do ourselves no favour to be distracted from what we should be doing – we’ve been vacillating about it for years now..
Once we make our single point and make it stick, all future talk of carbon emissions and enviro-impact will be as straw in the wind – and won’t they look daft. But only if we stick it to them. Who has the grit to lead the way?
Tax fairness for road use and maintenance? ALL vehicles (bicycles included) using the highway system should be paying road use taxes and licensing fees. In fairness, bicycles and ‘alternate fuel’ vehicles should be paying higher licensing and use fees, as their owners are unfairly evading the fuel taxes that sustain the road systems! There is no free ride, in a ‘fair’ world, right?
If you insist on ‘sharing the road’, shut your pie hole and share the fully burdened costs of building and maintaining the transportation system that you use to access your work site and transport all of your food, clothing, building materials, home heating fuels, garbage collection, mail, etc. to and from your door and local markets. Let’s be fair…… really fair, for a change.
Mac the Knife,
That’s been my position for many years, especially with the proliferation of bike lanes. I propose an annual use tax for bicycles equal to 25% of the average annual motor vehicle tax.
Pamela Gray says (August 14, 2011 at 7:47 am): “The way it is now, we have been lulled into thinking that the government will fund our everyday needs right down to the toilet paper we use. How did we get this far down that path?”
Too many of us like to think we can get “somebody else” to pay for the things we want for ourselves. In reality, the “free lunch” costs us more (directly or indirectly) than one we buy ourselves, but too many of us aren’t smart enough to see that. Supposedly about half of all Americans pay no income tax, so we may be at a tipping point.
This is not a replacement for fuel tax (that’s what the government will tell you), but an additional tax. Fuel is already so heavily taxed that when they would increase taxes further, people would escape into ‘alternative’ fuels (alcohol, cooking oil, heating oil). And two ‘small’ taxes are less shocking than one large tax.
Other ‘benefits’ (for the government): automatic parking fines, automatic speeding tickets, taxing electric and hybrid vehicles, and a reason to finance the unneccessary Gallileo system. And do not forget the lobbying of the electronics firms that will produce all these electronic toys.
Bike tax, you know we had that in the Netherlands from 1923 until 1941, all bikes had to have a copper plate mounted to the bikeframe with a year on it stating that the tax for that bike that year was paid.
If you where unemployed than you did not pay bike-tax, but you where required to have this tax-plate so you where issued a plate with a big hole in it so that everyone else could see that you where living on the dole!
During 1941 the German occupation forces decided that it would be a populair measure to abolish this tax, and yes we where glad to get rid of it. Later the Germans took our bikes and in general everything else to help their war-efforts, from late 1944 with the southern part of our country liberated the Dutch people in the still occupied western parts got their first taste of when a modern society is being cut off from food and energy supplies.
±20,000 people died that winter of starvation and many more suffered from prolonged malnutrition and a brutally cold winter.
“According to the article, the proposal will be introduced slowly as a replacement for the current car and gas tax…”
Heh. I don’t think anyone in or out of politics believes THAT bit of nonsense. As Jan says…
Jan P. says:
August 14, 2011 at 12:18 pm
This is not a replacement for fuel tax (that’s what the government will tell you), but an additional tax.
=================
Why do something simple (gas tax) when something as complicated, and as issue prone, as this will do?
Smokey,
I advocate the same annual licensing costs for bicycles and alternate fuel vehicles as is paid for personal automobiles. To that I would add a tax equivalent to the local, state, and federal fuels taxes paid by a motorist averaging 7000 miles per year at 30 mpg. The federal subsidies paid to encourage purchase of alternate fuel vehicles (up to $7,000 US for ‘hybrid’ and electric vehicles) , should be halted immediately.
Why such seemingly high taxes for the pedal pushers and alternate fuel folks? The installation and maintenance costs of highways, with or without ‘bike lanes’, are largely driven by environmental effects and maximum cyclic loading effects from heavily laden trucks, and not the secondary wear effects from private autos or bicycles. The heavily loaded trucks are transporting all of the goods and services that the citizens (auto owners, bicyclists, pious prius owners, et.al.) produce or use in their daily participation in commerce. The highway maintenance and repair costs from environmental damages (freeze/thaw induced potholes, corrosion of bridge structures and concrete reinforcing bars, unanticipated compressive buckling from thermal expansion effects at max temperature, etc.) are ‘fixed’ costs that should be paid by ALL who use or benefit from the goods and services transported on the highways.
The owners of petroleum fueled cars and trucks are paying a disproportionately high percentage of the highway costs, through their embedded fuel taxes and licensing fees, as well as federal subsidies to purchasers of alternate fuel vehicles. It’s way past time for the alternate fuels and pedal pushing freeloaders to ‘pay their fair share’.
Share the road? Share the costs!
“I am saying that there must be a theoretical limit on the general tax paid by the bulk of tax payers (ie middle class). Obviously, we cannot take 100% of a person’s income unless the state supplies 100% of a citizen’s consumption in all items, including luxury.”
When I still lived in the UK, at one point I worked out that for every extra pound my employer paid me, about 60% went to the government in tax, or over 80% if I bought petrol. That was the point where I started caring more about increasing my leisure time than increasing my salary by working harder or longer; my boss could offer me a bonus for getting a product out faster, but what’s the point of working late into the evening if the government would see more of that money than I would?
G. Karst says:
August 14, 2011 at 10:58 am
ok – understand your question better now – however neither tax I mentioned was in any way windfall taxes, nor tax evasion penalty taxes, nor any one time contingency tax.
They were part of the ‘normal’ income tax systems. The UK Super tax ran for several years and cost the UK massively in business people (the UK Brain Drain primarily to the States) and of course resulted in many businesses being set up ‘off shore’.
The Scandinavians are up at over 50% – and yes; they get a lot back in the way of health and social care