I am not sure how Rafizi Ramli gets his numbers from. Does he pluck it from thin air or uses the same faulty MS Excel that DAP uses to calculate their CEC elections results? Yesterday, Rafizi Ramli revealed that the govt collects RM17.3 billion in all car taxes. However, official figures shows a tax collection of RM7b to RM8b a year. Even this panda-looking fella in his video says RM7.3billion: youtube/watch?v=nxjmGrkLVBM So, how come last year, Rafizi says RM7.3 billion and suddenly this year, the figure becomes RM17.3billion? Are you making numbers up, Rafizi or Excel error. Rafizi also says that the govt spends RM13.7 billion in fuel subsidies. However, as our govt had said, despite the cut in subsidy, the government would still need to spend more than RM21 billion on RON95, diesel and liquefied petroleum gas subsidies for this year. So, RM21 billion is still more than the RM 17.3 billion alleged by Rafizi and certainly a whole lot more than the actual RM7.3 billion in car taxes. Rafizi seems to simply throw out numbers as and when he likes. Maybe Microsoft should refund him his faulty copy of MS Excel or perhaps Rafizi should stop using pirated Excel if he didnt pay for it. In actual practice, Malaysias car taxes are not that high on the low-to-middle range cars and this is why the car prices of mid-range cars such as Honda City and Toyota Vios does not differ much between Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Singapore is of course a whole lot more expensive. Contrary to popular belief, Malaysias car prices are not the second highest in the world for all cars but only on certain categories of cars that have very high CC and are 100% imported. Lets have a look at these data from EconsMalaysia on car taxes collected : Actual sales of passenger vehicles reached RM74.85 billion in 2012, while excise duty collection on the same reached RM7.14 billion. My calculator says that the average excise duty levied is thus just 9.5% of sales. That’s a far cry from the 40% implied by a straight line calculation. The idea that cutting out the excise duty for cars alone would see prices drop that much is thus largely wishful thinking. In fact, for the average Malaysian family car (national or otherwise), the 9.5% estimate would be conservative since excise duty progressively increases for larger cars and for fully imported cars. The tax burden is lower for entry-level and mid-sized sedans, but so too would any reduction in prices from abolishing excise duty. For one thing, unlike the sales tax, the excise duty on cars is not a flat rate based on manufacturer’s retail prices, but is actually adjusted downward for local content i.e. the published rate is just the maximum rate and won’t apply to all cars equally.Both the nominal and effective rate of excise duty can and would be considerably lower in practice. Second, from what I’ve been made to understand, excise duty is levied on the ex-factory price and not at the distribution level, which means that it doesn’t take into account the profit margin on distribution. -- econsmalaysia.blogspot/2013/06/how-much-would-car-prices-come-down-if.html
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 01:55:25 +0000