It’s a Rip-off

The Serbian Ministry of Domestic Affairs has started swapping number plates as of October 1. Instead of plates bearing a red star, owners of passenger vehicles will now have those with Yugoslav flags. The switch will cost 150 dinars and an additional 50 for new registration.

Car owners will even be able to order the numbers they want, but that will cost them extra. The removal of an ideological symbol such as the red star will also be an additional expense, from 300 to 10,000 dinars depending on the size of the engine.

Assuming that there are about 1.5 million vehicles in Yugoslavia, switching number plates alone will boost the budget by approximately 300 million dinars. After the entire rip off is completed, the budget will increase by no less than 1.5 billion dinars.

According to Mirosinka Dinkic, an economist dealing with social issues, the Government’s intention is to pay for current expenses rather than boost the crippled social welfare program. She backed her words by pointing out that the state’s expenditures are much bigger than the tax revenue.

Where will the tax money go? The answer may lie in what an anonymous police chief said to an unhappy car owner. “Who do you thing is going to pay for treating the boys crippled in the Kosovo conflict. This country is in imminent danger of war. You drive around in your fancy cars while we bleed in Kosovo: what more do you want?”
Sources which are well informed about the state budget say that approximately four billion dinars found their way out of the federal budget because both of the Yugoslav republics, Serbia and Montenegro, refused to pay their share. Certain tax alleviations proposed by the federal authorities never saw daylight. Instead, the Federal Parliament passed a law imposing special taxes, such as a tax on expenses for defending the country. The Army’s expenditures have reportedly increased by more than 1.5 billion dinars. The tax is expected to raise about one million dinars, meaning that there will still be a half-a-billion dinar hole in the budget.

Practice shows that budget holes can’t be patched up by raising taxes because by definition this state is too expensive. The only thing the state can do is think of new ways of ripping-off the people. Very soon, we might have a tax on the air that we breathe and on life in general.