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The Problem with the german Inestment in infrastructure an military

As you may have heard, after the german elections germany now mants to massively increase its defense budget with an annual fund of 500b € and another fund of 500b € should be created to secure investments into the german infrastructure for the next ten years. This push towards taking this big amounts of debts comes from our conservative party CDU and also from the so called (they dont deserve that name anymore) social democrats (SPD). The CDU is famous for its so called "black zero", which basically means, that the state shouldnt take debts. This ideology has led towards germany having an investment backup of around 600b €. The CDU also pushed towards holding onto this idelogy through the whole election campaign. Quite strange that they now want to take on one trillion euros of debt. Even more strange after realising, that they sued the last government over 60b of debt. This move also includes a change to the german debt brake, which forbids the state to take debt, to allow increased military spending by taking on debt for this.

Currently our parliament is still manned by the last elections. The CDU wants to push this plan through with the old parliament, because for this he needs a majority of 2/3. In the new parliament this means, that the CDU would have to talk with the leftist party or commit political suicide (again) and talk with the facistic AfD. hey however are unlikely to back his plans because they are absolutely neoliberal and are against all forms of debt.
Now comes the thing. The leftist will, under no circumstances, back the current plans of the CDU for multiple reasons:

  • The CDU wants to cut taxes, valueing at about 100b €/year. Mostly for the rich. So this debt of 1 tr€ is basically just a compensation for the tax cuts.
  • Debt only for weapons: The reform of the debt brake only allows debt for investments into the military. Investments into infrastructure or for batteling climate change would not be backed by this and would have to get financed exclusively by the fund of 500b €.
  • Money for me, but not for thee: The CDU needs this money to finance their tax cuts. However, they still want to be able to eventually sue future governments for taking on debt.

The leftist party will only back this reform if the debt brake gets reformed to allow for investment into the infrastructure and other vital parts. I am not sure what their take on the 500b € investments into the military is, but knowing them i can only guess, that they dont want this money to only flow into weapons, since they are mostly for reforming the military spending to only invest into weapons that are needed for defence.

2 comments

  • Is the headline some sort of attempt at click-bait? Edit: ok you changed the title. Makes more sense now.

    You say yourself that the Linke party is not blocking a removal of the so called debt-brake, and their co-chair is on record saying that after the debt-brake is removed the new coalition can also spend things on defense as part of the regular budget that doesn't need approval from the Linke (as should be obvious anyways).

    So it is clear that this is purely the CDU that is causing this stalemate as the Linke has offered a very reasonable compromise.

    But even without considering the above, intentionally or not the Linke is currently the one strengthening the negotiation position of both the SPD and the Greens a lot, both of which at least in theory also favor higher budget flexibility. I sure hope these parties appreciate that the Linke is taking on all the heat and bad Springer press coverage for their benefit (obviously the SPD seems too stupid to use this opportunity though).

    • It was just me terrible at naming and the forgetting to think about this again. Apart from that youre completely right with the stuff you say.