Yes, that's what it is now nominally (especially now that it's directly related to CO2 emissions). But what I meant was - these taxes existed in a time when nobody cared about that. The BPM was even called a 'luxury tax'. It's a way to tax 'excessive' consumption, which is how cars were (are?) seen.
The justification, on the surface, has changed nowadays. My point was, though, that the relatively wide spread acceptance of this sort of tax is not because everybody is so environmentally conscious; it's because it's a function of the cultural instinct to 'punish' those who flaunt wealth. Or if you don't want to call it 'punishment', at least to make those who want to drive luxury cars pay more on top of the taxes they need to pay that also apply to other goods (i.e., VAT). I mean, if those taxes were to make those driving cars pay for the building of roads and to counter emissions, you'd charge a flat fee, or a per-kilometer fee. You wouldn't tax them proportional to the list price of the car. A 250k Lamborghini doesn't wear out roads more than a Kia, but it costs several times the purchase price of the Kia just in taxes.
So my remark was that, despite today's bend of environmentalism, these taxes need to be seen in the context of the broader societal mores of egalitarianism; or 'suppression of those that show wealth in socially not accepted ways', depending on how you want to spin it.
Reading over the Wikipedia article[1] it seems that you're historically at least somewhat correct, since this tax used to be directly based on the price of the car, but since 2007 it's been partially and then in 2010 entirely based on CO^2 emissions.
There are other tolls & fees for owning a car in The Netherlands. I don't own a car, but from what I've read taken as a whole the tax policy here has nothing to do with "luxury", you're free to buy a million Euro gold-plated scooter.
It's meant to discourage excessively heavy vehicles and those who pollute more. Any sort of a flat fee that doesn't take into account the weight / size of the vehicle doesn't account for the disproportional cost to infrastructure incurred by larger & more polluting vehicles.
"you're free to buy a million Euro gold-plated scooter."
Sure, and if you keep yourself warm at night by burning e50 bills, you won't be taxed extra, either. My point is not (or only partially) about the current tax, or how it's justified. My point is that the societal context in which these taxes were instated are a key point to understanding why things are the way they are. And the pertinent part of that context is Calvinistic austerity, which is ingrained in Dutch collective psyche. I know that there is significant cognitive dissonance among a large part of the Dutch population when someone claims that religion has shaped their world view in some way, especially among those that consider themselves 'atheistic liberals', but it's silly to deny it - there are tomes and tomes written about this in social science literature. I mean fuck - my wife gets almost angry when I claim that her world view is shaped in part by the society she grew up in, and therefore by religion, as much of Dutch society is influenced by Christianity one way or another. But objectively speaking, how can this point be denied?
Anyway, when the BPM was reformed a decade ago, the objective was to keep it 'fiscally neutral', meaning that the amount levied in total needed to stay (roughly) the same as it was before. So current rates are a direct consequence of the way it used to be. In Belgian law (where a similar thing happened in 2012 or 2013 I think) it's even more explicit; there a (what I think is a) regression formula is part of the law that determined the new calculation for the 'road tax' as it is called there. Tweaking the parameters in that formula until projected revenue matched historical revenue was essentially how those rates were determined. In such a case, how can one claim that it's really about environmental concerns? Of course the direction (towards 'polluter pays') is there; but again, my main point (but I'll agree that I'm probably burying it between all the tangents...) is that the real answer to the GP is: to understand the why of these taxes, you have to understand the society it operates in.
That's very informative. Thanks, just to be clear I honestly meant my initial post as a question, not as a snarky rhetorical remark.
It's really interesting to know about the history behind something like an obscure tax, and how something like the EP directive to tax carbon emissions gets implemented as adjusting an existing tax with its own historical baggage at a level where it's exactly matching the revenue, but now ostensibly for a different purpose.
Unless the law changes though the tax will de-facto be phased out in the coming years/decades as zero-carbon vehicles get adopted, I wonder if that's something the people who made the change back in 2007/2010 explicitly had in mind or if it's an unintended emergent phenomena. It'll be interesting to see if the tax is allowed to go away or if there'll be another reform to tax luxury vehicles or something like that.
The justification, on the surface, has changed nowadays. My point was, though, that the relatively wide spread acceptance of this sort of tax is not because everybody is so environmentally conscious; it's because it's a function of the cultural instinct to 'punish' those who flaunt wealth. Or if you don't want to call it 'punishment', at least to make those who want to drive luxury cars pay more on top of the taxes they need to pay that also apply to other goods (i.e., VAT). I mean, if those taxes were to make those driving cars pay for the building of roads and to counter emissions, you'd charge a flat fee, or a per-kilometer fee. You wouldn't tax them proportional to the list price of the car. A 250k Lamborghini doesn't wear out roads more than a Kia, but it costs several times the purchase price of the Kia just in taxes.
So my remark was that, despite today's bend of environmentalism, these taxes need to be seen in the context of the broader societal mores of egalitarianism; or 'suppression of those that show wealth in socially not accepted ways', depending on how you want to spin it.