Comment: The company car privilege should be abolished – business

It is a practiced means of motivation by employers: valued employees forego part of their salary and instead are provided with a company car, which is usually worth more – and which they can also use privately. Often the tie rule applies: the higher an employee is, the bigger the engine can be. Some beneficiaries then click through offers for weeks in order to pick out the very best.

These blooms are entertaining, but the basic principle concerns society as a whole – and it finally needs to be fundamentally reconsidered. The upcoming coalition negotiations offer the perfect opportunity. Because the state has so far supported these goodies according to a system in which, absurdly, the following applies: whoever has, is given. Because whoever receives a company car saves taxes just like the employer (the same applies to the self-employed or leasing variants), usually increasingly as the size of the car grows.

The think tanks Agora Verkehrswende and Öko-Institut have just calculated what the “company car privilege” means financially: If Mr. achieve a total of more than 3000 euros. The savings mechanism behind it, among other things: The employers buy net and can claim the vehicle costs as a business expense for tax purposes – all in all, this is often more attractive than paying cash wages. For his part, the employee often chooses the list price method for taxation, in which private use is particularly blatantly lost in the flat-rate tax statement. Taken together, this is – according to the Federal Environment Agency – an annual subsidy of 3.1 billion euros, at least. The profiteers: four times as many men as women. And half of the subsidy volume goes to the richest 20 percent of the population.

It will be clear to everyone who is interested in the welfare state: This redistribution from bottom to top must come to an end.

Now it is said that Audi, BMW and Mercedes are selling so many high-quality cars in Germany precisely because of this regulation – and that that creates jobs. In response, large companies will be able to bear the company car costs in full, as is largely the case in the USA. And the still possible drop in sales of tens of thousands of expensive cars is being lost in the much larger overall production and should also be balanced out by the boom market in China.

If the SPD, FDP and the Greens in Berlin are still too afraid of the car lobby and want to continue to accommodate those employees and self-employed who want their car In fact need for the job – the representative, the craftsman – then they should at least adapt the privilege very clearly: The support for gasoline and diesel cars must come to an end in view of climate change. Instead, taxation linked to carbon dioxide emissions would be conceivable, as is the case in Great Britain or Belgium, for example – including an overall higher flat rate on the part of employees.

But be careful: important climate protection can also have an unjust distributional effect. Due to the even greater company car tax advantages for electric drives and the state support for such cars, the cost savings – i.e. subsidies – for employers and employees can currently amount to 8,000 euros per year if they choose a particularly large company car. Maybe good for the climate, but still bad for social cohesion in the country.

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