{"id":10022,"date":"2014-02-27T19:34:46","date_gmt":"2014-02-27T19:34:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=10022"},"modified":"2015-01-28T13:17:08","modified_gmt":"2015-01-28T13:17:08","slug":"feb-blogathon-2714-lunaticsasylum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=10022","title":{"rendered":"Blogathon 27\/14 \u2013 lunatics\/asylum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just when you think the people at the top couldn’t get any more stupid…<\/em><\/p>\n

In October this year (2014) the DVLA are going to stop issuing tax discs for all motorised vehicles.<\/p>\n

The brain surgeons in charge of collecting revenue from road users have\u00a0decided to stop the requirement for displaying pieces of paper to verify that we legitimate road users have paid our tax.<\/p>\n

Instead, we still have to pay the road duty, but no tax disc will be issued.<\/p>\n

Our vehicles will just appear on a database (as they have been for the last five years), which the law enforcement agencies can check, on the spot.<\/p>\n

This is stupid.<\/p>\n

What the idiots in charge of vehicle tax should have done is get the Treasury to add 0.3p to the price of a litre of fuel, and then just collect 0.3p times the number of litres of fuel sold in the UK per year, from the Revenue.<\/p>\n

Doing this would have presented the taxpayer with three huge wins:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. the bureaucracy would have been kept to an absolute minimum<\/li>\n
  2. it would be impossible for people to not pay tax (and, as a sub-win, the\u00a0cost of running a legal system to deal with vehicle tax avoiders would have been saved)<\/li>\n
  3. the heavy road users would pay more, the lighter road users would pay less<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    But no, this simple logic is too much for the brain donors in charge.<\/p>\n

    They’ve come up with an alternative\u00a0bureaucracy; a system that requires people to pay for a thing, a revenue stream to process the UK public paying for lots of things, and an enforcement\/justice system to catch and then deal with people who don’t pay for a thing.<\/p>\n

    Fucking stunning.<\/p>\n

    But the ill-considered logic doesn’t end there.<\/p>\n

    The new system is not transferable.<\/p>\n

    Under the current system you tax a vehicle, right? And then you sell it. You have a choice of what happens to the remaining tax, you can either get a refund on it or you can let it go with the vehicle (adding it to the value of the vehicle you’re selling), and when the new owner gets it, the vehicle has some tax on it already.<\/p>\n

    Well, under the new system, when you sell a vehicle the tax becomes invalid. You lose the tax you’ve (essentially) prepaid. And the new owner has to start again.<\/p>\n

    So not only have the turnip-headed morons in charge saddled us with an inflexible system that carries an in-built overhead, they are inflicting a flawed system – one that requires a tax-evader-catching process and legal system – to run alongside it.<\/p>\n

    This is taking idiocy to a whole new level.<\/p>\n

    Well played, DVLA (and the government minister who runs it). Very well played.<\/p>\n

    Idiots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Just when you think the people at the top couldn’t get any more stupid… In October this year (2014) the DVLA are going to stop<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}