"But my travel agent never told me!!!"
Very expensive cars,what do you think?
I don't see what Star Trek has to do with this.watsonwatson wrote:Beam me up Scotty!
Protectionism involves putting high indirect taxes on products that are not made locally. Think about it.
Products not made locally...hmmm...but what does the word protectionism mean? To protect the same type of products made locally! Of which, there are none. That's my point.
Paul
protectionismpaulrenn wrote:but what does the word protectionism mean?
the actions of a government to help its country's trade or industry by taxing goods bought from other countries
Last edited by agn71 on Tue Oct 18, 2005 3:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
You're talking of two things.Cars are really expensive because the government believes that people should travel around by public transport and one way to achieve this is to make cars really expensive so that people travel by the cheaper option. To a brit it's amazing that a block of flats like my girlfriend lives in in Lauttasaari with 16x 35sq m flats only has a total of about 4 cars between them. In UK that would be more like 20-25 cars for the block.
The flaw in the curent way to force people to use public transport is that
a) people end up driving really old cars that pollute and lead to more serious injuries when people crash them (and so higher health care costs)
b) people living in really remote areas pay the same punitive tax on cars even though they have no viable public transport option.
I don't think the govt cares about point A and finns are not really ones to aspire to new cars anyway- they're happy to drive some old toyota or honda tin box. The govt also seems quite happy that it's tax policy means that people buy mostly japanese instead of european cars.
Point B could be solved by road pricing instead of high car tax. You pay for the miles you drive - higher prices in rush hours and on busy roads. I think they plan this eventually for Helsinki. Whether they then make cars as cheap as say sweden when they do that is another matter. If so then all existing car owners suddenly lose a small fortune because their car gets 50% wiped off it's second hand value.
Look on the good side - if you can afford a car in Finland then the roads are much emptier than they would be if cars were cheap.
The flaw in the curent way to force people to use public transport is that
a) people end up driving really old cars that pollute and lead to more serious injuries when people crash them (and so higher health care costs)
b) people living in really remote areas pay the same punitive tax on cars even though they have no viable public transport option.
I don't think the govt cares about point A and finns are not really ones to aspire to new cars anyway- they're happy to drive some old toyota or honda tin box. The govt also seems quite happy that it's tax policy means that people buy mostly japanese instead of european cars.
Point B could be solved by road pricing instead of high car tax. You pay for the miles you drive - higher prices in rush hours and on busy roads. I think they plan this eventually for Helsinki. Whether they then make cars as cheap as say sweden when they do that is another matter. If so then all existing car owners suddenly lose a small fortune because their car gets 50% wiped off it's second hand value.
Look on the good side - if you can afford a car in Finland then the roads are much emptier than they would be if cars were cheap.