DThe inflation rate is just eight percent. That’s what the metal industry union is asking for in wage increases for employees in the ongoing wage negotiations. So what’s the problem? It’s not quite that simple. But it may be easier than is always done. What is lacking became clear in this strangely calm but instructive edition of “Hart aber fair” on Monday evening in the first, albeit only indirectly: there is simply a lack of political will.
“Full tank and shopping trolley – can only the rich afford that?” moderator Frank Plasberg asked. The answers varied. If you believe Anja Kohl – and according to her lessons there is every reason to do so – then you have to answer the question with “yes”. The well-rested ARD stock market expert reminded the group that there was a risk of social upheaval if prices, especially for the cost of living, continued to rise sharply, but wages did not.
Kohl extends his claws
Anyone who has only known Anja Kohl from her stock market reports, in which economic policy comments or even criticism of the system are probably not at all appropriate, could think that she thinks quite immanently economically and is mainly interested in bringing (business) economic processes closer to the viewers – without regard to losses, so to speak, without socio-political considerations, without looking at the whole, at the common good. At Plasberg she stretched out her claws and, in addition to her undoubted economic saddle strength, showed a sense of social justice that can only be found left of the SPD – and not with black and yellow anyway.
She landed her first goal after FDP parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr and Gitta Connemann, CDU MP and chairwoman of the SME and Economic Union, had pleaded for a tax reform. This idea has also been heard of on other occasions, keywords “beer mat” and Friedrich Merz. You can not believe it, said Kohl, for 16 years the Union had formed the government, once a black and yellow one, but nothing had happened. It was up to the viewer to conclude from this fact that something like this was not politically wanted or not wanted enough.
The two politicians then rolled out the usual program: small and medium incomes, but above all relieve “the middle class” and gladly also “the companies”, state restraint in price and tariff policy, VAT down, plus the currently relevant ones Benefits such as the state subsidy for refueling, which was in all seriousness led by the FDP, and the not particularly sustainable, yes, actually already useless, nine-euro ticket.
Reality check for politicians’ ideas
These well-known ideas were reconciled in terms of everyday life, or rather involuntarily exposed in their ineffectiveness, by the master baker Jürgen Hinkelmann, who soon no longer knows how to pay his 600 employees properly when flour, milk and eggs become even more expensive. And from the father of the family, Jens Diezinger. As a kindergarten teacher, he is not a bed of roses anyway and now he has to see how he can offer his five children something other than a replacement for a couple too small during the inflation that is now, and according to Anja Kohl, possibly dragging on for a decade become soccer shoes.