What a blessing that I’m allowed to experience this in my life! A crazy ideology called austerity has ruled this country forever. The argumentative basis for the debt brake, black zero and Swabian housewife was always a staged generation conflict; the CDU politician Christian Haase recently tried to reactivate it in the Bundestag: leaving “huge mountains of debt” behind future generations would limit their future opportunities.
Take a look at the parliamentary debate on the red-green-yellow supplementary budget of December 16: Haase, other CDU people and the AfD are visibly fighting for composure because the traffic light adopts the ideology of the state that saves for the supposed good of the younger generation. They suspect what the hour has struck: “I consider this supplementary budget to be the beginning of the end of the debt brake, and that will be linked to your name,” Haase poisoned in the direction of Christian Lindner (FDP).
Lindner and the beginning of the end of the debt brake? Yes! The new Federal Minister of Finance is now executing the plan of his predecessor Olaf Scholz: he is pushing 60 billion euros, which the state had decided to take up because of the corona pandemic but did not spend in 2021, into a climate and transformation fund. He secures the money for future investments, instead of simply withdrawing the admission. “60 billion euros that our children and grandchildren would not have to repay in the future!” Said Haase’s CDU party friend Karsten Körber outraged.
Long Covid threatens
But the turn of the traffic light coalition is convincing: The pandemic is an “extraordinary emergency situation” for which the Basic Law provides for the suspension of the debt brake and which has economic consequences. Investments neglected because of the acute fight against corona threatened to lead to economic “long covid”, as the FDP housekeeper Otto Fricke put it.
Otto Fricke’s speech was a special treat, Yanis Varoufakis could not have better explained the sense of government borrowing for the future: To be against all new borrowing, “that’s like when you tell a home builder: ‘Wait until you’re 62 and have saved enough money, and then you start building.’ “
For those young today, government debt does not necessarily harm. The economist Jens Südekum can explain this perfectly: “If I take out a loan to buy a house, then the normal case is that I will have completely paid off this debt during my lifetime. The state works differently: It takes out a loan that has to be repaid in ten years, and it will – but because a new loan is issued in ten years. ”This game goes on and on. National debt is therefore “always a distribution problem in a generation” – between those who have to pay the interest in the form of taxes and those who hold the national debt and receive interest for it. If you want to reduce this problem in favor of the poor, you can tax the rich more heavily.
Lindner’s dark side
That is exactly what Christian Lindner does not want – the dark side of the fiscal policy awakening that he is currently leading. But at least the interest on loans that the German state takes out is extremely low right now, and in some cases it is even paid to borrow money from someone. Not doing this would be fatal – especially for future generations. What definitely harms them are rotting schools, slow internet and climate change that is causing more and more extreme weather. Original sound Christian Lindner in the Bundestag debate on the supplementary budget: “It’s about responsibility for future generations.” He referred explicitly to the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court on the Climate Protection Act.
Lindner, Fricke and the Ampel know: Your success stands or falls with the fulfillment of the promise to modernize the country. And that costs a lot of money. Which is why the coalition has come up with all kinds of ideas to circumvent the debt brake. Loans are taken out outside the core budget, through the Climate and Transformation Fund or public companies such as the railway, the Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks or the Credit Agency for Reconstruction. It is not a clean solution because it weakens Parliament’s control. But it is clearly better than not investing. Incidentally, a majority of Germans are of the same opinion: From representative surveys during the coalition negotiations, the economic research institute of the Hans Böckler Foundation concluded: “Germans are losing fear of national debt”. What a blessing that I’m allowed to experience this in my life!
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