Some of you might remember my old red VW van also called the Big Red P(orn)-Bus by my German friends (darkened windows seem to wing the imagination of some peeps!), some of you don´t even know it ...
This air-cooled van is still with its 18 years and almost ran 220000 km (it´s not much, uh?) a very reliable vehicle that offered us a lot of space (5 peeps) and took us from here to there and back quite often. It took even Macca and me to Gareth´s place and Conrad and his family back to Holland ...
Apparently our new government thought it´d be a very good idea to take the leadership in the CO2-reduction within the EU ... therefore they raised the taxes for carbon-unfiltered cars depending on their weights up to almost 400% of the original taxes. Cars refitted with carbon filters would have taxed then with less fees ...
More over the tax offices have been told by the government to date the first day of tax raising back to January 1st, 2006 ... so we Germans have to pay back the missing tax depts back to this date.
The first letter of my county´s tax office informed me to pay back my dues of 1600 Euros until July 30th, 2007!!!! My better half and me checked this document and found a mistake in it: the authorities obviously mistaken the max weight of the van (2.8 tons) with the actual power of the engine (1570 ccm). One telephone call at the tax office and the new official tax letter was on its way to us ...
Yesterday we received the long awaited letter yet its content was still disappointing: at least 1300 Euros still to pay. After checking this one we found again another mistake: this time the fact of having a built-in catalytic converter wasn´t considered by the lovely peeps at the tax office.
I assume you see where this will bring us again, don´t you!?
Anyway, ... we´ll be less charged for the van hopefully but in the end it means we can´t hold it anymore since there´re still running costs like insurances and repairs to be considered ...
Nonetheless I still feel a bit robbed ...
PS: my van will be sold tomorrow ... an era has passed by then ...
I'm surrounded by grumpy old men!
rant rant!!! censored !!
However this doesn't seem to be of interest to the eco-narzis. I'm not an ecological-scientist by any stretch of the imagination, however, I can't help but think that a major shift in the magnetosphere and magnetic poles could and will quite possibly cause major upheavals in the climate.
