Are you being taxed to go to work?

Tweet

Rail fares go up every year in the United Kingdom with some city-to-city season tickets for commuters costing $10,000 dollars a year. Imagine paying ten grand to get to work! It’s crazy, by far the most expensive trains in Europe, if not the world. The price is soooo high as the government want to cut their public funding of the trains and make the commuters pick up the bill. A lot of the commuters going to London are well paid so just another tax where the politicians can get the cash best as the train commuter has no choice. Problem is the trains are privatized and the track is publicly owned and so the train companies make big profits from the price rises. Commuters are not happy. Public transport fares in the cities is also on the rise. London introduced a congestion charge in the 1990s to quite rightfully try and cut pollution but make a few quid on the side to fund it and beyond. It worked and for the next twenty years CO2 fumes fell in the capital. The congestion charge was £5 in London at first but as people took to public transport and left their cars at home the tax take dropped from the charge and so London put it up to £10 to cover the losses. That’s always the drawback for governments from preventative taxes. Recently, diesel fuel, which we were all told was cleaner than petrol over the decades, has been called a ‘dirtier fuel’ than petrol by clean air groups, the VW ‘cheat software’ saga an example of how car manufacturers were trying to get around not making super clean cars as the clean air targets were too hard to hit, the car industry, on mass, cheating instead. This caused punters to turn their backs on diesel cars for a dramatic 37% fall in diesel sales over 2017 in the United Kingdom, seeing those CO2 level rising for the first time in twenty-five years in the U.K. as drivers went back to new petrol cars. The suspicion is that the government are not too bothered about clean air and want to increase taxes from cars and the transport hub by exploiting environmental concerns. As the congestion charge in London forced people out of their cars and onto the Tube and buses, you guessed it, London whacked up the prices of buses and The Tube. The cheapest tube fair in London is £3.00 now for a single journey. Once you are over ground it’s another three bucks if you use it again. I have a theory that the government want to move away from road taxes and congestion charging and start to tax actual movement in your car. They rake in about 60% tax on a gallon of fuel and so why not tax the fumes? Pollution charges are the next big tax to come in for drivers.