EV Tax - welcome to the future

[mygoldfishbowl]

CS Garth said:

ATG said:

UK VED raises about £40bn or roughly 7% of tax revenue, which is entirely out of proportion to the cost associated with maintaining the bleeding road network or any other costs that are directly attributable to allowing people to get from A to B. There's no justification for it other than we've collectively put up with it and you've got to raise the revenue from somewhere. If that source of revenue is naturally going to fizzle out, yes, it'll have to get raised elsewhere, but that's no argument for transferring it to EV usage just becoz "using roads too, init?". You shift the burden to an activity you want to discourage or to the least economically and socially damaging source you can think of. You might, for example, increase tax on air travel or booze or fags or stey food that gives you bowel cancer, or you might increase VAT or income tax a little.

The items you refer to are what as known as economically inelastic goods - broadly, items whose consumption changes less than proportionally to any price/tax increase (or decrease).

The problem is that this is being disrupted - people are quitting smoking, air duty take has massively dropped and will take years to recover and ste foods are losing their appeal.

We need to identify and tax the new economy (fags, booze and petrol are somewhat 20th Century) - new inelastic goods and services that people would still use even if their price was increased significantly.

Ergo I would put a 50% tax on mobile phone bills, onesies and posting st on arsebook. We’d have the national budget deficit cut to zero inside a year.

Legalise some drugs and tax them. There's plenty of silly people who'll pay it.

Personally I think in the future we're going to see tax on electric charging as well as new taxes on other items. Someone has to pay for the covids.

[Alucidnation]

How else is the infrastructure going to be paid for?


Anyone thinking that 'free' RFL was here for good, is delusional.

[Bobtherallyfan]

If the Government could come up with some formula for tax based on the smugness of EV owners then the budget deficit would be reduced overnight.

[colin_p]

The government here in the UK isn't clever or capable enough to commission and roll out any coherent policies without them turning into a fiasco. I therefore don't think road pricing or price per mile is going to happen. They might try, spend a few billion on it and then scrap the idea and good luck to any IT peeps who will make it fail and be scrapped.

More likely is that they will hand over control to the power companies who will extort us even more for 3rd or even 4th gen 'smart' meters and the bonkers tariffs mentioned up thread.

When that time comes, I'll likely get a drum of red diesel (less taxed and far cheaper) delivered once a month and charge the EV with a good old fashioned smokey diesel generator. By that time it might even be cheaper to power your house with that diesel genny as well.

When the time comes I quite fancy one of these, reckon it would do the job nicely.
https://www.justgenerators.co.uk/silent-diesel-gen...