Taxes as an attack on the weakest: How CO₂ price and truck toll makes everyday life of low earners massively difficult

The tax policy is hidden behind technical terms and complicated models, but in everyday life it shows its true face: It is a frontal attack on those who are already living on the brink of their financial resilience. When new energy, transport and transport taxes are introduced or expanded, they will not become effective in a vacuum, but deep in theWallet of ordinary citizens. It’s not the big profiteers of the global markets that sweat, but the cashier, the bricklayer, the caregiver, the small business owner in the country. The political packaging may come across as technocratic, the effect is brutally simple: Everything becomes more expensive, first for those who are least able to resist it.

Hidden tax on daily life

What is sold as a supposedly necessary steering tax acts as an additional excise tax, which eats up through every shelf in the supermarket, every tank filling and every heating bill. Higher transport costs do not disappear into any theoretical cost block, they are immersed in the prices of bread, milk, fruit, meat, building materials, medicines andcraftsman bills back up. The levy may be formally addressed to companies or freight forwarders, and it is actually passed on to consumers. If you have to turn over every euro several times, you will notice this immediately: The shopping basket is getting smaller, the worries are getting bigger. The political claim that you want to control behavior is cynical when people have no more leeway, their behaviorto be adjusted because they have long since shut down to the absolute minimum.

Chain reaction through the supply chain

The real force of these taxes unfolds because it does not stop at one point. It pushes itself through the entire supply chain, from the forwarding agent to the wholesale trade to retail. Each station puts its serve on top, each player secures his margin, and in the end the full load ends up at the end customer. Heating oil, gas, electricity, fuel, everything is getting more expensive – and in parallelthe prices for each goods that have to be transported even a few kilometers are rising. Those who earn little have to sacrifice an ever larger part of their income to cover basic needs at all. There can be no longer any talk of reserves, accumulation of assets or relaxed life planning. The state claims to levy taxes on performance, and createsAt the same time, a system in which central taxes are completely independent of income.

Companies pass – citizens pay

The official narrative is that companies should be forced to increase efficiency and rethink through the taxes. The reality is sobering. Companies are almost completely passing on the rising costs, because otherwise they would endanger their profits and thus their investment ability. Large corporations have enough market power to push price increases. Small businessesface the alternative, either to go along with prices and lose customers or to be stuck on the cost explosion. In both cases, it is clear who loses in the end: the customers who have no choice but to pay the new prices because they cannot do without energy, food and mobility. The tax system thus develops into a shadow VAT thatmeets, whether poor or rich, and thus every narrative of social balance leads to absurdity.

Rural regions as the main loser

This policy is particularly relentless to people in rural areas. If you don’t live in a well-connected city center, you’re dependent on the car, whether the planners in the ministries like it or not. Journeys to work, doctor’s appointments, shopping, school, club life – without a car, a large part of the life organization simply collapses. If then, of all things, fuel and transportBeing particularly expensive is a blow straight to the face of the rural population. Local transport is often incomplete, unreliable or simply not available. At the same time, the prices for regional products are increasing because they too have to be transported via roads and motorways and pay every toll, every tax. The rural area is punished twice: due to a lack ofalternatives and through higher costs for any form of mobility.

No real alternatives, but real burdens

Critics are right when they denounce that these charges hardly have any real steering effect as long as there are no affordable and functioning alternatives. If you have no choice, you cannot change your behavior even if you want to. If you have to go to work every day, you can’t just leave the car at home just because a tax has been increased. Whoever lives in the country cannotSuddenly switch to a local transport that is hardly available in practice. In this situation, any additional cost screw does not act as an invitation to rethink, but like a punishment for living and working where politics and infrastructure have been neglected for years. The alleged control of behavior proves to be an empty phrase that is the simple function ofTaxes veiled: collect money.

Small businesses under constant fire

The consequences for small and medium-sized companies are serious. They are the backbone of the economy, pay local taxes, train and secure jobs. But it is precisely they get under the wheels when transport, energy and logistics are becoming more and more expensive. You can’t streamline arbitrarily, you can’t move every process to a different continent, you don’t have an armadaof consultants who turn every tax into tax structuring. Every extra cent in logistics is depressing your margin. If you can’t raise prices, you’ll lose, if you raise them, customers will lose customers to larger players who will be able to go through the price war for longer. The tax policy helps to bleed out local structures, craft businesses disappear, and medium-sized companies to theshatter and thus jobs, training places and regional stability are also endangered.

socially unbalanced to the core

It is no coincidence that many people find these taxes deeply unfair. They act like a flat-rate penalty for everyday life: for heating, driving, shopping, working. Those who earn a lot can put up with the rising costs, maybe adjust their lifestyle a little, but without existential threats. If you have little, you have to increase the price of fuel, the electricity bill,Pay for weekly shopping with painful cuts. Holidays are canceled, children’s hobbies are lost, visits to relatives are reduced, and in the end they even save on eating. This creates a creeping but merciless intensification of social inequality that is not in any legal text but can be felt in every transfer.

Loss of trust as political self-destruction

When citizens gain the feeling that taxes and toll systems are less for the common good, but above all fill the coffers while they themselves fall by the wayside, then confidence in the state will erode. The official language speaks of responsibility, transformation, modernization. The language of those affected is: one more bill, one more increase, nor a waiver. whoExperienced that new stresses are always coming without infrastructure being better, alternatives accessible or social inequality decreased, no word at some point. The distance between political decision-makers and the population increases with every additional tax that makes everyday life more expensive. At the end there is a dangerous climate: some rule from a well-supplied bubble,Others no longer feel represented, but sucked out.

This policy forms a society in which the costs of the system are borne upwards. Energy and transport charges, which are enforced regardless of real living conditions, income levels and regional differences, are not simply instruments of control, but an expression of an attitude: The crowd should pay without asking. That’s what drives the wedgeDeeper into society, deepens the division and bit by bit destroys the credibility of public institutions.