Lexus: the car of the pretty wealthy.

[DFW]

89. Partially, but you don't have Value Added Tax there

Or, Government Heroin, as it should be called. Governments here just keep making it higher and higher, never have enough, and after a while increase the dose just to keep the "high" they had before, finding they gag and choke if anyone suggests lowering the dosage, er, I mean, rate.

I'm pretty sure the prices quotes in the States are exclusive of local sales taxes, but in most states, this means somewhere between 5% and 10%, and each State can figure out how much it wants/needs to charge. In most of Europe, it means somewhere between 19% and 24%, and it's always decided by the central government, independent of regional considerations. Labor costs are, of course, higher, too, but efficiency is good here (at least in Germany). Nokia closed down their factory in Bochum (near us), put 4000 workers out of work, and moved their manufacturing plant to Romania due to the cheap labor there (long live the European Union!). What they forgot to take into account was the quality of that cheap labor. At least a THIRD of the phones their Romanian plant made didn't work, and they closed it down, too, soon after it opened. But they didn't come back to Germany. They just moved on to China (kiitos/Xie Xie Ni).

Cars made in the States cost less, of course, but the Germans still slap heavy import taxes on them if they are shipped here, so German car buyers don't get any breaks in the price. If they did, BMW might move its whole manufacturing operations to the States. It would start a worker rebellion, of course, but Europeans have never been known for long-term political planning, though Adenauer and De Gaulle came close with the original idea of the EU ("hey, what if we made it so we would never fight another war?&quot . They had the right idea, but their successors botched it, of course. Schmidt and Giscard came close to replicating the close cooperation of Adenauer and De Gaulle (and look what happened to them--within a year of each other, both were tossed out of power).