Exceedingly harsh taxation

Some people are lucky enough to live in a country where they can write this:

It actually turns out that if we want to truly, substantially, rapidly reduce energy use the only way to do it is with lifestyle changes, and the only practical way to force that is through exceedingly harsh taxation (i.e. $3000 per year per car, $5 per gallon on gasoline). It's not a problem susceptible to a painless technical fix, mostly because we've already done most of what can be done easily.

Emphasis mine. Welcome to the wonderful world of Euro-Socialism, where an American's nightmare of exceedingly harsh taxation is reality today! And no, it has not led to any significant behavioral or lifestyle changes. More about that later, but first, let's dissect the various and varied ways in which the Her Majesty's Government in the Netherlands appropriates your money.

How much do you think the tax is on a new car? It's one of my favorite games to play with innocent Americans. When I ask the question like this, they immediate assume it must be some horrendous percentage, like 20? 30%? There are two taxes levied on cars: one is the general 19% Value-Added Tax, the other is a special car tax of 42.5% adding up to a grand total of 61.5%. These taxes are additive, not cumulative. Be thankful for small mercies, I suppose.

This way a $29,220 Chrysler 300M in the US ends up costing almost $54,000 here in the Netherlands. I know, the percentages don't quite add up, but there are other effects at work too.

That's one part of the puzzle. Steve mentioned gas prices. A liter of 95 RON (that's 89 octane in the US) gasoline costs 1.17 euros, or about $1.15. This translates into $4.43 per US gallon. Excessively harsh yet?

The only part where we're still "lagging" behind Steve's nightmare vision is the annual taxation of cars. The road tax here is based on the weight of the car, and for the above-mentioned 300M, you'd pay about $700 to $800 in road tax per year. It gets cheaper for smaller cars, obviously. But if you amortize the tax on purchase over, say, 5 years you're a lot closer to the dystopic $3000/year.

Erich Honecker called "real existierender Sozialismus:" socialism that really exists. Yup. My pocketbook can tell you all about it.

Of course, none of the state-thuggery has led to any substantive change in lifestyles. Sure, there are more old cars on the road. There smaller cars on the road. But people will go to great lengths to have a car, because the car is such an empowering tool. Without a car, the radius of your existence shrinks dramatically. It can partially made up for with public transport and bicycles, but the loss of freedom is tremendous. And that is why people will rather cut back on other kinds of spending before they make the decision to give up their car.

So why not raise taxes even higher? Because the pain threshold has been reached. As the mass protests in Britain showed last year, taxes on gas are about as high as people will put up with. I am amazed that people will actually put up with this insane level of taxation. Perhaps it's because I spend a lot more time in the US than the average European.