Tim May wrote:
"Here's something to think about - while queuing up for petrol this afternoon (yes - I confess to being a panic buyer) I worked out that OPEC is charging $30 a barrel and our government is taxing us at slightly over $150 a barrel - ouch!"
this is true, and similiar pretty much all over europe.
This is from the U.K., where tax policy is ahead of that of the U.S. Whilst we are (almost) ready to mcveigh the tax collectors and wipe out millions of burrowcrats, the Brits are quite sheeplike in accepting taxes which are several times the price of the underlying commodity. Germany, France, Sweden, Italy, and essentially all other European nations are similarly sheep-like in their acceptance of such taxes.
sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about. this is an economic puzzle, not a political one. food, clothes, tobacco, gas/petrol
Then you neither understand politics, or economics. And no, I don't claim to either, but as near as I can tell there isn't a spits worth of difference between economics and politics.
and a couple other things have a very unique price structure, in that the demand is pretty much independent of price - you just need so much food or tobacco or gas, no matter what it costs, and you don't have any
Food maybe, but tobacco and gas are both things that *can* be done without.
in the end, it doesn't matter much. I don't think europeans pay much more in taxes than US citizen do, it's just distributed differently.
-- A quote from Petro's Archives: ********************************************** Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question. -- Thomas Jefferson, 1st Inaugural