Merz’s defence investment package in jeopardy as Greens vow to oppose plans
The Greens are "not available to fund the election promises of the CDU and SPD through debt."
The Greens are "not available to fund the election promises of the CDU and SPD through debt."
You're viewing a single thread.
Germany needs the investment, so hopefully they can get an agreement.
True, but Merz wants to use this package for agricultural used Diesel, raise tax reliefs for people who commute to work by car and lower taxes for the gastronomy. You see, people in Germany do not really understand how this relates to defense or infrastructure. That is why the Greens do a really good job here and we can hope they pull through.
Maybe get an agreement that debt can only be used for hard infrastructure like rail, electrical grid, etc. and defense spending on weapons and military staffing.
The thing is they only need to borrow money to fund infrasrtucture because there's nothing left after their tax cuts.
Do you have a source on that? CDU is talking about 500B debt over 10 year. That's a lot of tax cuts.
The ZEW (Leibnitz institute for European economic research) calculated how the tax plans of all parties would affect the ordinary budget. The CDU would create a hole of over 100b€ per year. Calculated on 10 years it would be 1tr which is the amount of debt Merz wants to take on.
Source (it is in German tho): https://ftp.zew.de/pub/zew-docs/gutachten/Bundestagswahlprogramme_ZEW_2025.pdf
Thank you for the source. Just need to use DeepL for translation. Seems like the CDU tax cut is 89 billion euros but I'm not sure if that is every year or over 10 years (which is the standard accounting rule for government budget).
It is 89B € per year in tax cuts. Normal government term is four years...