My employer pays (yes, with the money that his employees generate) real! money as a full-service leasing rate including depreciation, interest, maintenance & wear package, tire replacement, GEZ (yes, you also have to pay that again on company cars), vehicle tax, fuel, and other fees such as UVV inspections, driver's license tests, etc. pp and whatever else accumulates in this bureaucratic Germany. Let's say a Skoda Octavia then has a rate including fuel of 700 euros. This (real!!) money is therefore transferred by my employer to the financer/leasing company. These are (real!) revenues of the leasing company, with which they in turn pay employees, etc. A completely normal process in Germany :)
Your statements miss my argument a bit. It is not about the "real" money of your employer, but about the remuneration component car for private use, on which you pay taxes at a reduced rate and no social security contributions, as is the case with cash remuneration. But to stick with the employer, who leases, in your example it is a car. He does that with "real" money, correct, but he does it tax-free on sales tax in step 1. It costs him 700€, not 833€. Furthermore, he pays it (hopefully :)) from his income and thereby reduces his profit, i.e., he does it without having paid income taxes beforehand. As a private individual, those ways are basically closed to you, right? You have to pay VAT, and that from taxed employment income. You further state that you pay the 1% and the distance kilometers. True, unfortunately that is heavily discounted because, as you yourself say, the car costs 700€ (actually even 833€ as a private customer) plus fuel and you tax on the basis of the list price a significantly lower equivalent value. Why? That is a tax benefit of the highest order!
The distance kilometers are also just left pocket-right pocket thanks to the commuter allowance.
Now my employer additionally allows me the private use of the company car, which is taxed like any other taxable benefit.
Perhaps that is the root of the problem. Taxing benefit in kind unlimited with a flat rate is convenient but unfair. And then not even charging social security contributions on it, even though it is a component of remuneration... yes, I don't think that's good.
1) I honestly cannot explain how you come to the conclusion that I don't pay social security contributions on the company car. It's always the same with every calculation of taxable benefits, regardless of whether company car or other perks from your employer.
I hope you recognize the contradiction in these two sentences yourself ;-)
You pay _no_ social security contributions on benefits in kind, which are especially high in the case of cars for private use (and your employer doesn't either).
2) My employer has 700 euro costs for this vehicle. Yes, that is real money that first has to be earned (by the way, by me :) ) I have additional costs of (net) 335 euros. In total, my employer and I pay in my opinion quite a lot of money for this car, don't you think?
Yes, a lot of money for a car, but no, not enough.
By the way, the biggest beneficiary of this scheme is not you, but your employer. Let's stick with your example. The employer has an employee to whom he must provide a car because of his activity, e.g., because he has to visit clients. Undoubtedly a business expense, in the example 700€. Now he is clever and says to his employee, hey, you can take the car home and also use it privately. It's really convenient for you because you have no risk and you drive a new vehicle cheaply as a flat rate, which you couldn't do as a private individual, but I as an entrepreneur can. But: since you get a vehicle from me, I don't pay you 5000€ salary per month, but 4700€. That's only fair. At that moment, the entrepreneur actively involves the employee in his vehicle costs. How convenient for him. He not only saves vehicle costs, but also about 20% social security contributions on the 300€ less salary, so a total of 360€ per month. And suddenly, the car doesn't cost 700€ anymore but only half.
For the two of them, that may be a win-win, but for everyone else, not. That this is a good deal lies in the tax advantages (the employer passes on the vehicle at cost to the employee, which he could never realize privately: no VAT, no depreciation/deductibility as a private person, etc.) and in the saved social security contributions.
Then maybe the problem is that we have too many cars?
Certainly. But we have created that over decades with various incentives, whether financial or by building cities for cars. I don't want to demonize cars outright; without a car, we would probably be pretty badly off.
It would, for example, be more sensible to limit the number of cars instead of electrifying them all.
Quite radical. Is that how you successfully manage change?
The diesel privilege should have been abolished long ago. Nobody outside of Germany cares about diesel anyway. The problem is that some years ago it was believed that diesel emitted less CO2 than gasoline (which is true) - so it was promoted.
The diesel privilege was introduced in the mid-nineties to keep the German logistics sector competitive in Europe. At that time, the diesel passenger car was not really relevant; they were sluggish, noisy clunkers. But since the diesel privilege was designed so that in principle everyone benefits at the pump, it was naturally a great (mis)incentive to make diesel relevant again in passenger cars. The key to this was the TDI, i.e., turbocharged diesel engines in passenger cars. Thus, the German taxpayer ultimately made the diesel engine in passenger cars socially acceptable with tax money. And now we cannot get out of this mess because both the industry (wants to sell diesel engines) and consumers (want to drive cheaply) would be the culprits. Politically a tricky issue where you can only lose.
By the way, an appropriate tax basis would be the energy content of one liter of fuel. A diesel engine does not consume less than a gasoline engine because its efficiency is better, but because one liter of diesel fuel contains more energy than regular gasoline. As a seller, I would be interested in pricing my fuel according to this utility. As the Federal Environment Agency, it would be important to me to levy taxes based on emissions.