Just when we thought we had seen it all, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Spatial Planning came up with the genius idea of levying yet more transport taxes, albeit without any real basis. The sub-headline on the Daily newspaper page reads: "With a new tax on abandoned cars, the Ministry of Infrastructure wants to force people to stop leaving their end-of-life vehicles on private land, in forests or in illegal car junkyards." This brings me to my very first question. Private land is already decreed by the property tax. Since we have already bought this land and paid VAT on it and the annual 'destination' charge, one would expect that we would have a little more freedom in what we do on it. Some of us garden, others collect antiques, which may not be oldtimers yet, but will be one day. And now the state wants to tax this hobby? On what basis? If they assume that we all have cars scattered around the property, I can show them how I have a 22-year-old Ford and another 23-year-old Pontiac, which is currently in the process of being restored in a mechanic's garage and will be driven seasonally after that, in an exemplary manner. When I check it out each year, the state will still "charge" me a tax of 25% of the annual road use charge! What roads, people of God? There is nothing on my land other than MY delivery routes and MY garages. 25% of the annual road use levy is a huge figure especially for large cubic capacity engines.
I am all for taxing or banning black market car junkers and unscrupulous owners who leave their cars on grassy areas to rot, but not branding every citizen if they age their car at home in their garage or concrete yard! In this way, many vehicles that might otherwise have become oldtimers may disappear, and heritage will be lost because of the greed of a particular department, because that department has not been able to correctly judge what are de-registered and what are end-of-life vehicles. The storage of de-registered vehicles has been taken very lightly by the Ministry and is worthy of criticism. A photograph of a car resting in a well-kept area should be sufficient reason to exempt it from the tax. Since such a regulation also requires proper management of the process, the Ministry has chosen to ignore the specific guidance on check-in and check-out. So, if I had a vehicle registered for half a year and then deregistered it for the next half year (autumn and winter), I would also have to pay the full tax, even though I had been paying the road user charge for half the year. I am told it would be too expensive if they only wanted to take a pro rata share. Of course, they cannot, because that would also mean less money coming into the budget. It is really macho. We can say something else about the level of the tax; it is significantly too high and has no connection with the road user charge to which the Ministry refers. Let them ask themselves, what is the road user charge used for? Given the rhetorical question, it will probably not be difficult to see that there are no roads in our own backyard. Least of all the state's. Where, then, is the basis for the new levy! That's right. There isn't! Someone has made this up, and one can only hope that the government will not be so flippant as to accept such an elementary-school argument. Moreover, we know that the annual levy is levied on the basis of engine capacity (another completely illogical correlation) and not on the weight of the vehicle, which affects the condition of the road. Engine capacity can only affect CO2 emissions, which we pay anyway in the import tax. And now, despite the vehicle being stationary (i.e. no CO2 emissions) and the national roads being unencumbered, we would like to pay a tax of 25% on the very infrastructure that we DO NOT USE. Sometimes we really should ask ourselves do we even have competent people in all our ministries? My suggestion is to scrap the existing proposal for the taxation of de-registered vehicles and to devise a better proposal that will exclusively target the owners of improperly stored de-registered vehicles. That is to say, those that are left out in the open to rot, leak motor oil and motor fuel and so on. And I think that is exactly what the Ministry of Infrastructure is aiming to do.