fuel prices

[Mux213]

Ivan,

I think the argument is valid, I just dont think they do it because of the argument.

Thats the problem with politics, they use a sound and good reason to do something bad. Its just like saying: speed traps are to make the roads safer.

That argument is totally sound. In many cases a speed camera besides the road will make that road safer, people driver slower there, less people end up in accidents. So the reason is sound, the effect is sound.

But then it goes wrong, politics suddenly find out that this is a nice cash cow... They have a damn good reason to put speed camera's besides the road and with that good reason they start to do bad things.
- They start to put camera's on places where people drive to fast but where hardly no accidents happen
- They start to give big fines for people who drive 4 km to fast.
- They take away officers who do other very important things like track down car thiefs and such and put them besides the road with a camera
The point is totally missed, speeding tickets right now is the #1 priority in Holland for the police force.

A couple of years ago when speed camera's where introduced the talk in the goverment was: "our goal should be to bring down accidents on our roads by 10% by the end of the year"
Now the talk is: "our goal should be to bring in 10 million euros more in speeding tickets by the end of the year"

A very very very good measure has suddenly been turned into a cash cow with the side effect that it is no longer possible for the goverment to fight the original reason they started setting up speed traps. The goverment is now dependend on the income from speeding tickets to a point where if tomorow everybody stopped speeding, we would get into serious financial trouble.

If tomorow I would go to the goverment and say: "here is a box, for a fraction of the price of all those camera's you buy each year you can install it into our cars and nobody will be able to speed ever again", they would probably lock me up and make sure nobody ever hears about this.

And its the same thing with eco tax. I totally agree with you that fuels should be much more expensive because there are so many hidden sideeffects to us using them. Making fuels much more expensive will make sure people will be much more motivated to find an environmentally friendly alternative.

But the problem is, that when you start using tax for that, and the goverment becomes dependend on the income of that tax, they will fight to the bitter end to keep that income and thus not support any plans to replace that which feeds them.

You just have to look at the energy market to see exactly that. Right now Holland could be using 100% clean electricity if we close all our own power centrals and import our electricity from other europian countries like Norway. And indeed a number of companies started doing so a couple of years ago. They now stopped because importing (clean) electricity is now heavilly taxed because the goverment was loosing to much money on this clean form of energy!