It's done gently, could be done faster if not everybody has a yellow shirt in their car and the masses of citizens would be a bit smarter to understand that taxing the poluter is the best way to go to reduce the use of fossil. It's also not lost money as it can be adjusted with other forms of taxation, like income tax.

In other countries though, those whom do not own cars, pay for roads and bridges cars drive on. Cars/fossil fuel subsidized by taxation.. Can you guess the country ?

This post was edited by Knoppie on Dec 2 2018 08:39am

very smart, tax people from the middle class until they cant afford the car to do their job/get to their job anymore
who is paying income tax then?

macron seems to be not paying attention, the same approach has completely and utterly failed in germany
electricity prices have DOUBLED since 2016 and are still rising for sake of ridiculous subsidy for renewable energy



This post was edited by ampoo on Dec 2 2018 11:27am

With middle/upper class car lease arrangements here in the netherlands, I don't think they can complain a lot. The problem is actually that when leasing an car here, through the company you work, reduces the top part of your income in exchange of a fancy car to dive. When the top part of your income is 50%, then you'll receive a huge tax cut (there is ofc some mitigation regulation there, benefitting efficient cars the most). On this part of the argument I do sympathize with the yellow shirts as the poor driving old diesels can pay for the lease drivers getting tax benefits for driving electric cars. And that is actually going to increase as a larger part of our cars driving around will be electric and not paying the taxation through buying fuel to build our infrastructure (that part of regulation counts for Germany/France and the Netherlands, the first part will deviate slightly from country to country).

A huge problem when using taxation and subsidies for encouraging a market based transition, is that you not only have to balance it off when one income group is hit more than the other. (Or more related to the German electricity discussion: When large energy consuming corporations are hit the most by these taxes). The balances also changes when progression is made (reducing obtained taxes/year), needing governments to change taxation again and again. Making it not an easy process.

/e ow, forgot: Electricity prices doubling in 2 years is fake news, look it up. -> stable since 2013

This post was edited by Knoppie on Dec 2 2018 03:27pm

you just cant compare the commute in the tiny, densely populated Netherlands with that in the huge and empty France.

> We don’t like that taxes are going up, it’s unfair
> We will riot and destroy tons of private and public property causing millions worth of damage that will need to be fixed/replaced, also another cost to the French tax payer

No wonder why France has played second fiddle to England and Germany pretty much the entirety of their history.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Dec 2 2018 05:02pm

source?



remind me, when was this tax increase leading to middle class germans not being able to afford cars anymore? in the germany i live that never happened, sounds to me like an #alternative facts germany...

source
https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/energie/kohleausstieg-der-strompreis-steigt-rasant-das-trifft-vor-allem-mittelstaendler/22736082.html?ticket=ST-441322-bimqkbn2ufPUgV4gobZb-ap2
its referring to the electricity market, which does not mean that individual bills have doubled necessarily, however the result are massive price increases for everyone

and btw, i was talking about france you fucking genius, out of this world reading comprehension again
seriously

if you were actually informed you would know that many french people literally cant afford macrons new prices anymore
and then i was referring to our idiotic policy, which leads to record numbers of people who cant pay for electricity anymore

https://www.focus.de/immobilien/energiesparen/strom-ratgeber/bei-330-000-haushalten-ist-der-strom-abgestellt-wenn-babys-an-weihnachten-frieren-so-arm-ist-deutschland-wirklich_id_8067886.html

our energy policy is bankrupting people

but hey, congratulations, you have invented another retarded narrative that isnt there and got debunked once again



its not fake, how do you get that idea? millions of germans, me included, just received letters that electricity will become more expensive AGAIN
depending on area there are increases ~ 10% for 2019

Source ?

Meanwhile, in Spain:

Andalucía had their regional elections today. For the first time since democracy was re-established 40 years ago, the left has lost absolute majority in this region. Centre-left PSOE has always governed here, either alone, with support of the far-left or with support of centrists. But this time, PSOE is 1 seat away from reaching majority with the centrist C's and 5 away from doing so with the alt-left party AA/UP (the andalusian branch of Podemos). On the other hand, right wing PP, centrist C's and alt-right conservative VOX do add up to an absolute majority. If C's and VOX can reconcile their differences, it's likely that Andalucía will have a right wing government for the first time ever, meaning they would stop being the only region in Spain that has always stayed on one side of a political spectrum and always ruled by the same party. If not, then there will likely be an electoral repeat.

This is a huge loss for the national government led by Pedro Sánchez, and a massive surprise literally not even the the most biased right-wing polls were expecting.

But the big news here is VOX. Pretty much out of nowhere, they's achieved 10% of the votes, winning 12 of the 109 seats in the regional parliament. Granted that a record low turnout has really helped them and it was also expected that they'd receive a lot of protest votes from PP, because literally everyone expected PSOE to hold on to the government, and lots of right-wingers were saying they'd vote VOX just to make a protest statement, but 12 seats is absolutely huge. They are a right-wing national conservative party. It's hard to accurately define it, as there seem to be two factions... the conservative one that calls for a defense of traditional family and catholic values, and the alt-right populist and nationalist one that applauds the likes of Trump, Bolsonaro and Salvini. Their leader, Santiago Abascal, praises pretty much all of the national-conservative and alt-right leaders around the world, but claimes Viktor Orbán is his biggest inspriation (because Le Pen is a protectionist/statist, Trump is too much of a show-man, and Salvini is a regionalist that supports catalan independence), and wants Spain to align itself woith the Visegrad group.

And it's precisely the catalan issue that has lead to the rise of this party. It's not really immigration or euroscepticism, like in other countries, it's the desire for a more centralized and strong national goverement. Although in the end it all boils down to the same thing: a protest vote against what a society considers soft policies (in this case, against illegal separatist coups, in other countries it's immigration or national sovereignty). It will be interesting to see how thing evolves on a national scale. I don't think VOX will gather that much support nationwide, but they'll definitely make it into the partliament, meaning that we'll have a party to the right of PP for the first time since democracy was re-established (you can technically count a pro-Francoist party that managed to get 1 seat in the fist elections, as a far-right party, but they were very interventionist and pro-workers rights, which the neoliberal VOX is definitely not). I should add, that VOX's proposals about Catalonia are nonsensical populism, like modifying the constitution to eliminate regional autonomism, which is something you can't do without 67% of the parliament's vote and a followup nationwide referendum, which is definitely not happening.



This post was edited by zarkadon on Dec 2 2018 06:27pm

Very interesting read, thank you! Cant really offer a lot of input on this, since I dont know a lot about Spanish policies, but it seems like the trend of social democrats getting crushed all across Europe has now arrived in Spain. Do you think Sanchez and his government have any chance at winning a majority in the next federal election?