When you see a garment of 100 peaks hanging, you often want to think about it. It’s money after all. You don’t have that choice when refueling. With a petrol car from the middle class you can quickly fill up with the current prices for more than 100 euros per service*. The government can easily do something about this with an excise tax discount, so that the purchasing power of the Dutch increases slightly again. But they don’t.
Almost half of what you pay at the pump goes to Vadertje Staat. Now taxes aren’t necessarily bad; just drive across the border at Belgium to see what happens if less money is available for infrastructure. Anyway: a little discount on fuel taxes until the madness has passed, wouldn’t be such a bad idea for the motorist at the moment. A minister in France suggested the same thing earlier.
If the government were to abolish excise duties altogether, that would save almost a euro per litre. And then the VAT is still on top of it. Now that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but a little discount so that the petrol is again below 2 euros per liter, would already make a lot of difference. Then a refueling will at least be below 100 euros. But according to Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Sigrid Kaag, lowering sounds ‘easier than it is’.
Why no excise discount for lower prices?
Rick Nieman introduces it to Kaag during WNL on Sunday† The minister explains that a fuel tax discount would mean less income to spend on education or compensation for entrepreneurs, for example. Quite simply, the income from excise duties is too much needed to reduce.
‘We are really looking at all options’, says the minister about possible other options for increasing purchasing power. ‘In the end it’s up to us to say: how much money is coming in, what are the setbacks, what do we need to cope with and what can we do to help people get by.’
* You can head that joke yourself, bastard
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