2024-08-21 14:01:10
The budget gap currently planned for 2025 is higher than it has been for decades. Nevertheless, the finance minister speaks of “common practice”. Has Lindner gambled and lost?
This could still be tricky: the global spending cuts planned for the 2025 budget are higher than ever in the past 20 years. This was the result of a query from the Union parliamentary group in the Bundestag to the Federal Ministry of Finance. t-online has received the answer.
Global underspending is a budget hole that all governments plan for in their drafts because not all of the money is actually spent. The traffic light coalition is planning on 12 billion euros for next year. Originally, three billion euros less were planned, as Lindner explained in an interview with t-online before the final budget compromise was approved: “Based on many years of experience, you can calculate that a good two percent of the entire budget will not be spent. So around eight to nine billion euros.”
The chairman of the CSU regional group in the Bundestag, Alexander Dobrindt, sharply criticised the coalition for this. “The traffic light coalition is trying its next budget trick. Instead of setting priorities, the traffic light coalition is creating budget holes with warning. Dubious budget policy has become the traffic light coalition’s trademark,” Dobrindt told t-online.
Lindner, on the other hand, speaks of a normal process. In an interview with ARD on Friday evening, he emphasized once again: “I don’t want us to cheat. I want us to handle taxpayers’ money seriously.” On the one hand, they want to relieve the burden on citizens. At the same time, everything must remain within the scope of the debt brake. He calls a global reduction in spending, i.e. a budget gap, of two percent, standard practice.
Looking back, it now becomes clear that this is not quite as common as it seems. In recent years, the federal government has always been below two percent, sometimes even below one percent or at zero percent. This is also evident from the Finance Ministry’s response to the CSU’s inquiry, as the following graphic shows:
Accordingly, in recent years the respective federal governments have sometimes planned with significantly lower expenditure cuts that were to occur over the course of the respective fiscal year. During the Merkel years, when tax revenues were booming due to the economic boom, the then finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU), who pushed for a balanced budget – the “black zero” – was even able to plan for several years without a provisional budget deficit.
After much back and forth, the traffic light budget may be in place for the time being. Whether it will survive the autumn, however, is a question.