Dutch to levy 'green' road tax

[ensho]

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2009/11/20091114103543156588.html


The Dutch government has approved a bill to impose tax on drivers for every kilometer they are on the road, a move it says will reduce traffic jams, fatal accidents and carbon emissions.

The new tax charges drivers of an average-size passenger car a base rate of $0.07 cents per kilometer, beginning in 2012.

While taxis, vehicles for the disabled, buses, motorcycles and classic cars will be exempt, drivers of heavier and, therefore, more polluting vehicles will pay more. The cost will go up for driving in peak hours.

GPS will track the time, hour and distance each car moves and send the data to a billing agency.

In return, the government says annual road taxes and purchase tax for new cars will be abolished - reducing the cost of a new car by 25 per cent, the Dutch transport ministry said.
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well done! wish we could say the same.

[Igel]

1. Many years ago I heard a discussion concerning

the USSR and China.

It said that governments tended to focus on their power base, and offered this as a criterion for analyzing their structure and motives.

The USSR's power base was proletarian. It treated the farmers and rural residents like complete and total crap. Starving them was preferable to having factor workers experience malnutrition because the factor workers supported the regime. It tried to apply factor methods to the countryside, and did it in a characteristically robber-baron fashion that made perfect sense to the city-dwelling fools.

Mao took the opposite route for a while--his peasant revolution focused on the countryside, on the nongmin, the peasants. It was only later when he recanted this bit of lunacy, but not before utterly contaminating a minor player that the North Vietnamese had supported in return for his allowing them to use the territory they allowed him to control: Pol Pot. Deng, I believe it was, opted for the reverse model. After all, by then the powerbase had significantly shifted in the citified party.

In each case, the government decided that it didn't need the support of the slighted group; in fact, since each group considered itself superior morally and ethically, and therefore more important than the other group, dissing the minority was a popular cause. It usually is (even if the minority isn't really all that minor).

We see this in US politics. Fortunately it's traditionally been far more muted, as most people remembered their rural roots. I think that's changing. It's already changed, to a large extent, in Western Europe (and had previously changed under Stalin in Eastern Europe).