Labour to punish the poor

Got this from Dizzy Thinks:

Brown and Miliband are planning to tax the poor off the road with plans for "a substantial increase in vehicle excise duty for higher-emissions vehicles" according to a leaked document in this morning's Mail on Sunday. The document, from Miliband to Brown, outlines a number of areas where the intention is to heavily tax everyone in an attempt to make them more environmentally friendly. It's not so much a stick as a baseball bat, and there is no carrot. Key proposals are:

• Substantial increase in road tax - bizarrely arguing that this will be an incentive to buy low emission cars. Which may be true for someone able to afford a new car, but won't be for low-income family of four driving a 10 year old Mondeo. I guess they're expected to catch a bus in our "integrated transport system".
• Remove the freeze on the fuel escalator by arguing it will create price stability of oil. I'm not quite sure how the tax on fuel in the UK impacts the global oil price, but that is the argument in the document.
• Total "road-user pricing". Basically a per journey charge to use roads which has massive technological and surveillance implications.
• Using Council Tax to target owner-occupiers who have have high emission homes. That basically means punishing those who live in period property.
• Putting VAT on air fares.
• Introducing an air passenger tax. That on top of the tax already, and presumably VAT.
• No stamp duty on purchases of "zero carbon" homes. Not quite sure how any home can be "zero carbon". This sounds like a headline grabbing policy that will never actually be applied because of its virtual impossibility to achieve. A bit like zero road tax on a car that is no longer in production.

Why does every problem have to be solved through tax? If anything there should be lower taxes. Some problems can be partly ‘solved’ through tax but if you want to reduce global warming then you have to do things that matter.

Here is what I would do:

Half petrol taxes because the correct petrol tax for the UK, for environmental reasons, is actually about half what we currently pay.

As planes have a lot of emissions something would be done about plane journeys. At the moment our skies are overcrowded with planes. With one policy I could change all that.

I would put a limit on the amount of plane journeys over Britain and then auction them off to plane companies. They would be sold in 10%’s meaning that if the limit was 100,000 each auction would sell 10,000 plane journeys. To stop a certain company getting them all a limit of 30% of all journeys would be implemented and the last 10% (which would be 90%) would not be given to the big companies but would be sold to smaller companies that are just starting up which would give the smaller ones a chance to catch up. I would then give the companies a chance to be able to trade their journeys if they weren’t going to use them for whatever price they wanted.

Seeing as how aeroplanes can have hundreds of people I estimate that the plane companies would purchase each journey for around £1000 which isn’t a lot if there are hundreds of customers per journey. This would give the treasury an extra £100 million atleast but it is bound to be more.

The auctions would be held every year.

The companies would then pass the cost on to the customer (if it is £1000 per journey for the aeroplane company it isn’t going to be much) and if it got expensive customers may decide to use other forms of transport.

I would then put £3 tax on every plane seat on every journey which would get the plane ticket even higher but not too high.

I would then scrap VAT on ferry/boat tickets and channel tunnel tickets for about a year to encourage people to use those to go abroad.

I would scrap VAT on energy saving light bulbs and renewable energy and low polluting products like low polluting cars, solar panels, double glazing and loft insulation.

This would discourage flying and may even encourage people from this country to holiday in this country more as it would be cheaper.

Hat tips go to Tim Worstall and Dizzy Thinks