I love this and I support the greens. If Merz’s top priority is giving tax cuts to the rich and paying for fundamental needs like infrastructure with debt (which is financed by the wealthy and who reap the interest) then he should be treated like an enemy of the state. If they’re willing to sell out their neighbors for Blackrock’s enrichment and the enrichment of other massive corporations than we should be calling them out on this every time they walk out of their homes.

To call himself a Christian too, while stealing from the poor and the working class, is unbelievably frustrating. Not that organized religion is a good metric to judge someone’s morality by, for that to be one of his defining characteristics is gross.

Thanks for this, I think an additional valuable data point is what the net tax income is in a typical year.

According to Wikipedia the budget for Germany has a net balance of ~97 billion Euros (2023). Which, if that value is correct and the analysis of the Linke plan is accurate, means we could wipe out the yearly deficit and still have €100 billion left over to spend. Which if carried over a decade would match the spending estimated by the debt break reform (over that same period of time) aimed entirely at the war complex and vague infrastructure needs.

This sounds like it proves that the majority of parties in Germany are not thinking about the future of the common man but of the future of the wealthy class. Perhaps there’s an argument for these plans being unpopular by the German populace, but that’s a matter of education and communication. We need everyone in Germany, east and west, young and old, historically conservative or progressive, to understand that reducing the tax on the wealthy and corporations only hurts everyone - and that the reverse benefits everyone.

I completely agree. I just want to see this topic brought up more by German news and journalists (admittedly as someone learning the language and new to the country I’m not exactly plugged in to the entire media landscape yet and won’t be for many more years, but what gets shared to Lemmy I do my best to read or get translated).

The CDU are going to lead Germany to the same problems the Americans have. The SPD needs to move farther left. And the German populace needs to rally around sane policy demands like taxing the rich, investing in public infrastructure (trains far more than cars), and heavily discouraging landlords and corporate land ownership.

How much of the debt would be eliminated if we taxed the rich more? Why is the conversation always around the debt brake instead of increasing the income of the government from the people most likely to corrupt and abuse it (and which have plenty to go around)?