No, this is no satire and no hyperbole. In Germany, the license fee is 17.98 Euros per month and every household has to pay it, even if nobody living there even owns a TV set or a radio receiver (or a smart phone or a computer). It’s essentially a household tax. If you don’t pay the fee, local government agencies will forcibly collect it. One of the tools traditionally employed by these agencies (these are the same people who are charged with collecting property taxes and other local charges) are tire deflators: They will put a device on the valves of your care tires which will deflate them after driving a couple of hundred meters.
(in German, with a picture of a tire deflator; this story was widely reported in the last few days)
For goodness sake, Forchheim makes the news for this? It’s a fine little town with a nice summer festival (Annafest) and a lovely old church…I’ve been there many times.
As for deflating their car tires, knowing small towns like this, it’s less about the tire and more about the shame of the big yellow thing hanging off the car.
Until very recently, the local collecting agencies (these are actually departments of the city administration) were also charged with collecting the motor vehicle tax. One can see a certain logic when they disable your car if you don’t pay your car tax, but not if you just don’t want to watch the utter crap they show on TV.
Yeah, it does have a certain logic. …as long as you ignore the concept of the legal system, courts, assumption of innocence, burden of proof, etc etc etc.
Actually, I like the idea–it does sound pretty damn effective for collecting small debts without any of that famous German bureaucracy.
So… why limit it to payment of fees?
Suppose somebody disturbs the neighbors because his dog barks too much at night?
Or he leaves his trash can out on the sidewalk at the wrong time?
Or he expresses political opinions that I don’t like?
Just to be clear, this is about the collecting process. Before that starts, the citizen of course was given the opportunity to appeal the decision and, if necessary, fight it in court. But disabling a car is way over the top under any circumstance, and above that, potentially very dangerous.
There are waivers for welfare recipients. But you have to prove it. You also don’t have to pay the license fee if you are (a) blind and (b) deaf, but you have to prove that as well (again, I’m not kidding).
Deflating the tire after the car is moving, who says the Germans don’t have a sense of humor?
Sounds like a device that if a person put on someones car as a joke they would find themselves in a great deal of trouble.
What do they do if you don’t have a car? Follow you around until they get a chance to push you down some stairs?
You know, until 2013, Germany had a different license fee scheme: You were only required to pay if you actually did operate a TV set or a radio receiver (or a car radio). They did have a small army (5,000 individuals) of free lance investigators whose job it was to hunt down folks who watch TV or listen to the radio without being registered as license fee payers. They were payed provisions for every poor schmuck who was caught red-handed (I have witnessed such an incident myself when I lived in a student dorm).
So I looked it up. When the coat of arms was bestowed upon the town at the beginning of the 13th century, people wrongly believed that their town’s name, “Vorchheim” originates from the Old High German word vorhe (“trout”). This resulted in the coat of arms showing two trout.
K…
