Incoming German govt from hell enthusiastically promises to make everything more expensive

Today an infuriating man came to my Dresden apartment to replace the old analog water meters with new digital ones, which send radio signals and can therefore be read from a distance. I owe the inconvenience to a traffic light “digitisation” law: On the one hand, the new meters promise more convenience for residents, who can now forget about annual meter-reading appointments; on the other hand, they open new possibilities for climatist surveillance, as building managers may now warn residents between billing periods about their excessive energy consumption and in this way save the earth.

Anyway, the guy they sent for this task plainly had no idea what he was doing. He took forever, made an insane amount of noise, spilled water everywhere and cut his finger. He also smelled terrible and looked like he had just arrived from some leftoid collective housing project.

All of this is to say that my day began poorly and this post will be a little under-digested in consequence. I mainly want to draw your attention to three ominous things about the incoming CDU/SPD government:

1) They are planning to borrow billions and they enjoy some of the highest tax rates in the entire EU, but they still don’t have enough money:

…[T]he new coalition government has ambitious spending plans… Various economic institutes, including the Cologne Institute for Economic Research (IW) and the German Institute for Economic Research … calculate a funding gap of around 50 billion Euros in view of these plans.

Business tax incentives, ambitions to reduce electricity price cuts via more tax fiddling, CSU plans to expand pension benefits for mothers and VAT reductions for the gastronomy sector are just some of the things they want to do that are projected to cost billions and billions. Meanwhile, “the list of possible additional revenue sources and savings seems less ambitious.” Through 2028, the budgetary shortfall is estimated to reach around 50 billion Euros. The plan right now is to hope that the economy magically takes off and tax revenues rise by themselves, but even if that were to happen (it won’t), “16 billion Euros would remain uncovered.” The traffic light coalition (ER: previous government under Scholz) had to wait for the constitutional court to blow their budget apart, but the present government does not really have a viable budget at all. I put the chances that they see 2029 at less than 50%.

2) They are furthermore planning to continue making all of us poorer via the redistributionist social welfare state:

In an amazing interview with the Bild am Sonntag yesterday, Chancellor-hopeful Friedrich Merz confirmed that “many workers will have less net income … in the coming years” due to social welfare contributions – particularly pension, health insurance and long-term care insurance payments. He also openly admitted that his party, the CDU, had failed to secure the tax relief for workers on which they had campaigned, because of “disagreement” with the Social Democrats. And when the interviewer asked him to confirm again that this means Germans “will … have less net income … because social welfare contributions are rising, but taxes are not falling,” Merz agreed that “these concerns are certainly not unjustified.” Then he said hastily – as if he were not altogether convinced of it himself – that he hoped his party could turn things around somehow in the coming years. This will of course not happen, there is no way it can happen, because of point 1) above.

3) They are committed to massively increasing energy prices as part of their project to alter the composition of the earth’s atmosphere:

Yesterday, on Caren Miosga’s godforsaken talkshow, Merz enthused about how he hoped to make oil and gas less affordable for ordinary Germans. He just sat there in his retarded little chair and repeated the phrase “more expensive” over and over.

It was insane, I have never seen anything like it.

To begin with, these things will become more expensive for everyone. And that is a mechanism that we have jointly agreed on, the carbon pricing – which, by the way, does not only come from Germany, but also from Europe…

We have decided to deal with carbon emissions not with unnecessary bureaucracy and regulation, but with sensible incentives. CO2 will become more expensive. If protecting the environment and the climate is important to us, then it will become more expensive … It will gradually become more expensive because we simply want to make it that way. We have two sectors in our country that are particularly important for the climate. These are transport and … home heating. And those will become more expensive. Yes, it will become more expensive so that people have an incentive to use it sparingly, to install economical heating systems, to drive carbon-neutral vehicles. That is our method …

So, to review: Merz’s government does not have nearly enough money to do all the things they are planning to do, despite the fact that no other German government in the history of the Federal Republic has had access to so much debt and revenue. What Merz’s government especially cannot do is lower taxes or restrain our increasingly unfundable and out-of-control social welfare state in any way. What they most especially want to do is make driving our cars and heating our apartments as expensive as possible.

This is going to be the shittiest government Germany has ever had, and they’re not even trying to pretend otherwise.

There is this whole tone of resignation and defeat, while the Union parties (ER: Merz’s CDU and the CSU) tank in the polls and Merz finds his favourability ratings chasing those of his disgraced predecessor.

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