Belgium's Car Toll Desperation Move

www.americanthinker.com

Belgium is preparing to introduce a passenger car toll. As European states are drawn deeper into the debt spiral, they are activating the remaining fiscal sources still available. Belgium, in particular, is becoming a potential candidate for the beginning of a sovereign debt crisis.

Economists and observers of global financial markets are increasingly focusing their attention on the debt problems of the European Union. Germany’s deficit of around six percent this year is causing growing concern, as Germany has long been regarded as the credit anchor of the entire euro financial market and the euro debt system.

Belgium, however, has remained somewhat below the radar until now. With total debt already reaching around 110 percent of GDP, Germany’s neighbor is moving into the group of the most indebted EU member states. A new borrowing requirement of 5.3 percent this year raises concerns that a debt spiral has also begun to develop there.

To finance widening deficits in public budgets, the three Belgian regions -- Flanders, Wallonia, and the Brussels-Capital Region -- have agreed on the introduction of a passenger car toll.

Starting next year, motorists will have to pay between 90 and 125 euros per year for a motorway vignette (toll sticker). Electric vehicle owners will receive lower rates. The European approach is unmistakable -- after all, the European Commission is practically around the corner.

To also charge transit traffic and tourists, short-term tariffs are intended to supplement the system. A tightly woven network of video surveillance is supposed to ensure that nobody can avoid the new system. Anyone driving in Belgium without a vignette in the future will face a penalty of 70 euros.

With around six million registered passenger cars and estimated transit traffic, the state could extract around 800 million euros annually from motorists. It is a convenient additional source of revenue, justified by the Belgian government with a familiar argument: The additional money collected will, of course, be invested in maintaining the road network.

It is not as if Belgian taxpayers were not already facing maximum tax rates. With a top rate of 52.5 percent, Belgian taxpayers rank first among OECD countries in terms of average tax burden.

S Grok upporters of a large state must acknowledge one thing: More does not necessarily mean better. High tax burdens destroy not only private purchasing power but ultimately also private investment activity, because fewer and fewer people are able to accumulate savings. Given these tax burdens, it is not wrong to speak of a state-driven raid on private resources.

What stands out is this: The higher the tax burden becomes, the faster the state apparatus continues to move upward in the debt spiral.

Naturally, the taxes that were supposedly already flowing into road construction will not be reduced at the same time. Nevertheless, major protests against this additional burden on motorists are unlikely.

We have already seen this in the current German tax debate, where alongside tobacco taxes and plastic taxes, further levies are now being increased in order to stabilize an increasingly dysfunctional state apparatus and a slowly but steadily eroding fiscal foundation. A disturbing apathy has taken hold in European societies in the face of this fiscal raid.

The situation of the euro economy is increasingly precarious. In key areas such as industry, construction, and especially the technological innovations of our time -- including artificial intelligence and robotics -- Europe has become disconnected from China and the United States.

Investment is declining. In Germany, net investment is already in negative territory. In Belgium, Italy, and Spain as well, the private sector is operating on wear and tear. The Belgian car toll fits perfectly into this picture.

In the Netherlands, politicians are working intensively on introducing a tax system that would tax unrealized financial gains in the future. That would mark a new high point.

Capital that has already been taxed several times would then be arbitrarily extracted from the private sector and transferred into increasingly empty public coffers.

What we are witnessing here are fiscal policy pre-emptive measures, because policymakers in the EU understand what could happen if financial markets lose confidence in Germany as the credit anchor.

Fragile states such as Belgium would hardly survive a sell-off of their bonds accompanied by dramatically higher interest rates.

Today, debt servicing already consumes around two percent of Belgium’s GDP. This makes one thing clear: The room for infrastructure investment and tax reductions designed to stimulate the private sector continues to shrink year after year.

The sins of the past -- above all the belief in the strong state -- are now catching up with taxpayers of the present.

When it comes to infrastructure policy, we should be honest with ourselves: Given the dramatic debt situation, which is likely to worsen further in the future, there will ultimately be no way around privatizing parts of the road network.

In Europe, we have allowed large parts of our economic future to disappear into the depths of bureaucracy. We have drowned the remainder of our future in the swamp of transformation ideologues and hundreds of thousands of subsidy seekers.

These are trillions of euros that are now missing from the productive sectors of the European economy.

With the expansion of the state economy, productivity in the creative and productive areas of our economy declines. Germany should therefore expect that the passenger car toll, which failed in 2019, will soon return to the political agenda.

The same applies to the Dutch taxation of unrealized portfolio gains. It will be easy for Friedrich Merz, together with his political allies, to present such policies to the public as a matter of fairness and social justice within the familiar political ping-pong of supposed coalition opponents -- while both sides ultimately pull in the same direction:

The state apparatus, the power base of this political approach, must continue to grow. The green transformation requires an annually increasing contribution from taxpayers. And the military sector will also consume another 100 billion euros per year in additional spending in the future.

At the end of this legislative period, we will look back nostalgically and say:

How wonderful was the era of Germany as a low-tax country in 2026.