The Moonbat derides Clarkson today. Fair comment perhaps. But this:
If there were not a massive hidden subsidy for private transport, those
who decry the nannying bureaucrats couldn’t afford to leave their
drives.
….
The £11.4bn that it is spending on road building is an £11.4bn subsidy to the Conservative party.
Fuel Duty (not including the VAT on top of it) raises £ 24 billion a year.
What subsidy Georges?
All your roads are belong to us!
I love cars, and I love to drive. But I am also of the opinion that Clarkson is a dangerous blinkered fool.
Unfortunately today’s article from Georges gives me inclination to group him into that category too.
I can’t be bothered to respond to the moonbattery, but what’s interesting to me is that Australia is now seen to be hand-in-hand with The Great Satan in the eyes of the left. This is somewhat of a turnaround, I think. Is Oz losing its cool?
Tim, I really think you need to read that quote again. He isn’t saying that ‘motorists’ are being subsidised, he’s saying that the road lobby subsidise the Conservative Party, a contestable argument to be sure (its mostly gambling moguls these days) but it has nothing at all to do with fuel duties.
And are you seriously suggesting that British motorists are paying all their environmental externalities through tax? Come come.
Tim,
You forgot the X billion squids garnered by the Road Fund Licence as well. And tolls nowadays.
James, by my interpretation Moonbat is accusing the government/loacl council/department of works/whatever you want to call it of providing 11.4 billion sovs worth of pork directly to the conservative party, because as we know every evil, twisted car user is a Conservative voter and every Conservative MP wants to destroy the
planet by getting us all to drive our cars as much as possible. He makes no concession that roads may serve some useful purpose to society, just that money spent on road building is a massive vote buying subsidy for the Conservatives and thus should be stopped.
Personally I quite like Clarkson if only for the entertaining way he tells the pc enviro-lobby to f**k off every week. I wouldn’t want him as Minister for Transport, or Minister for the Environment either for that matter. But as an entertainer who tweaks pc tails he’s not bad.
Then again the previous three or four incumbents at the MOT haven’t really shone either, so maybe Clarkson wouldn’t be such a bad choice after all. He probably couldn’t do as much damage as Prescott or Byers did.
Anyway, that’s my tuppenny worth
RM
RM, that’s broadly what I said. Tim however is suggesting that Monbiot is saying that motorists are being subsidised through road building (unless he would like to correct me by pointing out that, in fact, the Conservative Party single handedly pays £24bn in fuel duty every year), which is simply wrong.
There are even more massive subsidies for buses and trains. Perhaps we should all stay in own villages never to stray beyond the next valley. And inbreed.
What Moonbat does not seem to be able to comprehend is that private transportation is vastly more useful than public. If it has enviromental costs then the best way to mitigate them is not trying to force people onto a massively less useful network but by making private transport more enviromentally friendly. Which is excatly what the eeeevil car corporation are trying to do by developing hydrogen powered cars (hydrogen best generated by Titanium Oxide catalsis or via electricity from nukes). Technology will save us.
I find public transport vastly more useful than private, when done properly. It takes me places without needing to drive, and I find driving dull and unpleasant. So don’t assume, James, that your own view of private vs public transport is true for everyone else. Personally, I’d like public transport to be better and private transport to be cleaner. And if people could be persuaded that their two minute drive to the post box is unnecessary, than that would be an extra bonus.
I’m a great fan of getting around London using Pedal powered Bikes.
However when is King Moonbat going to tell me off? I pay no road tax, cause (some) congestion, emit quite a bit of C02, need to use loadsa water when I arrive at work/home for a shower and I encouraged the evils of global economic freedom when I bought a bike frame manufactured in Taiwan.
Don’t tell me I’m not being subsidised! Apart from all the tax doubling the price of my bike to 600 quid.
Tim adds: 600 quid? Was it one of those fancy aluminium frames with the added scandium? From a company called Taiwan Hodaka?
Don’t tell Moonbat but the material to make that was flown, yes, flown, from Moscow to Taiwan via Amsterdam. And the scandium itself came from Kazakhstan and was flown to Moscow. And it comes from a (imagine deep scary voice here) uranium mine.
Wonder if Moonbat has worked out the CO2 footprint of his own bike?
..or perhaps he isn’t sufficiently machismo-challenged to insist on a bike made of FA22 Raptor structural materials.
Meanwhile, let us jeer at the idiocy of thinking 17.5%=double.
The £11.4bn that it is spending on road building is an £11.4bn subsidy to the Conservative party.
I must say the road building industry have got their operation pretty damned efficient if they can donate 100% of their Turnover to political parties. I see roads being built but they must incur no costs at all!
Given this impressive record, can we subcontract the NHS to them as well?
The usefulness of a network, any network in cluding transport networks, is equal to the square of the number of nodes (places for getting on or off it). The difference in usefulness gets very big very quickly as you increase difference in the number of nodes. Private transport has a awful lot more nodes than public, so it ends up vastly more useful.
Alex,
“Meanwhile, let us jeer at the idiocy of thinking 17.5%=double.”
Double comes from the following taxes which directly increase prices.
Corporation Tax.
Employee Taxes raising wage costs, therefore costs and therefore prices by roughly 50%.
Business Premises Taxation.
It’s not just VAT fool.
Tim.
Yes it is a fancy Aluminium frame.
Dudes,
Why don’t we just ignore this hate-filled ignorant idiot?
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