The "PENDLERPAUSCHALE"

What ? You  don't know what a 'Pendler' is ?
Do you know what a Pendulum is? Ah, now we're getting there. A Pendulum swings back and forth and back and forth...
Therefore, in Austria, 'a pendler' is a person who drives back and forth from his home to his work and back and forth again...
You get the idea? So far, so good.
If my memory serves me correctly, many people who live in Ajax, or in Whitby, or in Barrie, but work in Toronto, go back and forth  either by car or, when possible by public transportation.
Nobody thinks about Government paying you an allowance because you drive to work. You either find a job nearer your home, or you find a home nearer your job, or you just drive to work in the morning and home again after the office closes.
Well, that's not the way they do it in Austria:
Here you get a "Pendler Allowance".
You just fill out a rather detailed form, stating how far it is from your home to your work, and wether there is public transportation,  and how far you would have to walk from your home to the closest public transportation stop. You may, for instance, live 10km or more from the nearest railway station, or there is no bus running from the railroad to your job etc etc... this entitles you then to take your car and you get paid as follows:
If you can use Public Transit: 
20km .... you get    696.00 Euros p.a.
40km .... you get 1,356.00 Euros p.a.
 more than 60km .... you get 2,016.00 Euros p.a.
The above is the 'small Pendler Allowance'.

If you have to use your car, because of certain existing conditions 
you get much more, right up to 3,672 Euros per year. (large Pendler Allowance)

There are no restrictions as to your annual income, or the distance which you travel.
I live near a lovely lake, the Klopeiner See, on the shores of which are several expensive villas, occupied by people earning, I assume,  well in excess of $150,000.00 per year. Are they entitled to charge society for the fact that their office is in Klagenfurt, about, say, 50km from the front door of their home ? Surely not, you say ! Wrong... It matters not how much they earn... it matters not how far away from their jobs they live...  they are entitled to either the "small Pendler Allowance" or if they cannot or "cannot be expected" to use public transportation, the "large Pendler Allowance".

Nobody considers the fact that such mollycoddling encourages people not to even try to find work closer to home, or home closer to work.
Also, nobody worries about the fact that the further you drive, thereby polluting the environment more, the more you get paid by this insane regulation.
And it does not seem to anger anybody that even "the rich" get this socialist inspired payment?
Where, on the one hand Austrian politicians scream: "Tax the Rich"
on the other hand they pay them to drive to work.

If this is not "Alice in Wonderland" I don't know what is.

Maybe I should figure out how far Bertstravels travels, I might get paid by this crazy Government.

Bertstravels.