[Skybird]

How true. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes:


Germany's Perceived Poverty - Don't Worry, Politics Helps

In Germany, much hardship is homemade and imported, but the true causes of the loss of prosperity are ignored. About a country between perceived poverty and imagined wealth.

Germany is a rich country that affords itself a lot of poverty. This is the complaint between Kiel and Konstanz, which is being voiced all the louder as the gas emergency and elections draw nearer. And elections are always looming somewhere in the federal republic. And the CDU and CSU are no longer willing to be inferior to the SPD in the competition for the biggest spenders. Bavaria's Prime Minister Söder is now topping the SPD with a demand for a "winter housing allowance" for everyone. And all together they discovered the pensioners as needy, to whom one would have to transfer compellingly likewise an "energy lump sum" of 300 euro. For it there is wide agreement. No one is to be left out in the cold when the warm rain of money comes down.

Pensioners make up a third of the electorate

This is curious in that no senior generation is better off than the current one. Only about 3 percent of the 21 million pensioners are dependent on basic benefits. And this is despite the fact that private assets may not even be taken into account when calculating need. This income, such as interest, dividends or rent, also remains hidden from pension insurers. As a result, even the senior citizen who was registered as an assistant in the family business as a mini-jobber in order to be covered by social insurance at low cost is counted as a small pensioner even if she receives handsome earnings from an apartment building.

This not uncommon example illustrates that indigence in Germany is based less on facts than on ideology. 21 million pensioners make up almost a third of the electorate. So Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Hubertus Heil (SPD) is gifting this group with the highest pension increase in 30 years: 5.35 percent in the West, 6.12 percent in the East. This will cost the pension funds 19 billion euros, with a further 2.6 billion for supplements in the event of reduced earning capacity. The pension at 63, another expensive election bait of the SPD, costs 36 billion euros per year. The trend is upward, because early retirement is popular despite deductions, which at the same time disproves complaints about the plight of pensioners.

At the same time, the media are virtually searching for needy people who can no longer afford rising energy and food prices. Even the Greens, for whom both could not be expensive enough for ecological re-education reasons, are joining in the paternalistic tying up of aid packages. The Green Minister of Agriculture Özdemir, who had complained about the "junk prices," especially for meat, before the invasion of Ukraine, is now worried about "empty refrigerators." Even the frowned-upon vacation trip is suddenly becoming an indicator of poverty. Yet the chaos at airports and long traffic jams testify to the opposite. Nor are the hungry bellies crowding the buffets of cruise ships, whose most loyal customers include the supposedly needy senior citizens.

Germany reaches its limits

Nor are the complaints of the charitable food banks about a lack of supplies coupled with growing demand for (almost) free food an indicator of growing poverty. On the one hand, these aid campaigns have stimulated demand themselves by increasing supply; on the other hand, it is worth taking a look at the clientele. German is hardly spoken in these social institutions: A not inconsiderable part of the "new poverty" now so loudly lamented is imported. But anyone who mentions this is immediately silenced in Germany as a "racist," "xenophobe" or even a "fascist. Figures, if they are collected at all, remain a secret. Even Friedrich Merz, who as CDU chairman is trying to project a liberal image, no longer repeats his statement that without immigration there would be "one million fewer Hartz IV recipients".

Although Germany is reaching its breaking point not only in terms of the railroads, the traffic light government wants to make immigration into the social systems even more attractive.

At the same time, the SPD and the Greens want to raise Germany's maximum taxation even further, [Germany is the highest taxing country in the world already now, Skybird]which means that the highly talented people in demand will give Germany an even wider berth in the future. This can also be seen in the 131,000 naturalizations last year, which rose by another 20 percent: It is mainly Syrians, Turks, Romanians and Poles who are receiving German passports. Not Swiss, Americans or citizens from other wealthy countries. This is where the talented Germans are drawn to. [Germany has since many years a massive brain drain that is kept a secret in politics and media, Skybird].


This universally propagated generous welcome culture is not only due to the claim to finally be the world champion of humanity. There is also a political calculation behind it: the more poverty can be proven with questionable statistics, the easier it is to redistribute from top to bottom. At the same time, the social market economy can be denounced as cold neoliberalism and the socialist planned economy can be pushed forward. In Munich, 3850 euros net for a four-person household is considered the "poverty risk threshold."

Reasons for the loss of prosperity

Of course, more and more people in Germany are also affected by a loss of prosperity. Rapidly rising costs for energy, housing and inflation are reducing disposable income even in the upper middle class. But in all this, people act as if Putin, epidemics (Corona) or greedy speculators (oil industry) were to blame. Not a misguided energy turnaround that shuts down nuclear and coal-fired power plants without replacement; not an ECB that engages in forbidden state financing with a flood of money and creates price bubbles; and not a sprawling welfare policy that creates an illusion of care for itself as a major sponsor of all perceived emergencies. In the last three years alone, Berlin has incurred an additional half a trillion euros in debt for this purpose. Adding all payment obligations, these now amount to 14.7 trillion euros, as financial scientists have calculated. The pension burdens for civil servants alone, who at an average of more than 3,000 euros a month are three times higher than social pensioners, add up to 2.7 trillion euros. And a deep recession is only just beginning.

Living beyond their means

That is why the second narrative is not true either: Germany is nowhere near as rich as it feels. The federal, state and local governments have been living beyond their means for years. From education to the federal railroad, much is in a sorry state. Despite constantly rising tax revenues. But these are primarily spent on social welfare, i.e. consumed instead of invested. Every fourth euro earned in Germany goes into social pots.

The idea of reordering priorities and limiting oneself to the essentials does not occur to anyone in the country that is still so fond of Ludwig Erhard. Instead: Don't worry, politics will help. State and local governments do not reconsider their stately spending programs, but only ever demand that the federal government help. This creates a culture of sacrifice in which every achievement creates new shortcomings, as can be seen in particular in the former GDR. It is never enough.

For example, the federal minister of social affairs, Heil, wants to reward non-work with significantly higher Hartz IV [a German social wellfare scheme, Skybird] rates, even though the economy is desperately looking for personnel. This contradiction is felt especially by voters of the former Labor Party. The upwardly mobile middle class knows that it is footing the bill for ever new aid programs from which it hardly benefits itself. Meanwhile, their savings are losing value due to inflation and a screwed-up energy policy. Only the Greens secretly see Germany's creeping deindustrialization as a success on the road to climate neutrality. Where it suits them, they turn to the devoted Christian Democrats.

The SPD, on the other hand, is collapsing even in its own heartlands of the Ruhr region, which have been abandoned to poverty migration from southeastern Europe. The departure from Agenda 2010, with which former Chancellor Schröder, who had fallen out of favor because of his friendship with Putin, reformed the country, has not paid off for the SPD. And certainly not for Germany. Yet the Social Democrats would have to dare more Schröder in order to win back the middle class, which still believes in pay through performance. But courageous reformers have no voice in Germany.

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Germany is in steep decline, and the fall is irreversible, I am quite sure. And the cream on top of it: it is without need, and willed by ourselves. We want it so. We have nobody but oursleves to hold responsible for the mess.

That says a awesome lot of what you ever need to know about the Gemans.