Commentary on the draft budget: austerity budget? Are you kidding me? Are you serious when you say that!

Finance Minister Lindner’s draft budget is described as an austerity budget – but it’s anything but that. The state doesn’t have an income problem, it has an expenditure problem.

There is a lot of talk now about the austerity budget. But is that true? At first glance it looks like this, after all the draft budget is 30 billion euros lower than before. But this can only be achieved through numerous booking tricks. For example, by releasing billions in reserves and immediately hitting them on the head – fully aware that this will make future budget deliberations more difficult. Or by shifting spending from the budget to the climate and transformation fund.

Sure, you can do that – but you won’t save a cent. And thirdly, the budget situation is embellished by the fact that expenditure is no longer financed from the budget, but from the social security funds. This then has a negative effect on the contributions to health, long-term care and unemployment insurance.

Taxes are doing better than the economy

One cannot speak of an austerity budget because expenditure has increased significantly compared to the pre-Corona period. If you take the year 2019 as a benchmark, it is an increase of 25 percent – not even taking into account the secondary budgets with their billions in expenditure.

The state does not have an income problem, but an expenditure problem. Due to inflation, taxes are developing much better than the economy. The real problem associated with the accounting tricks: Once again, problems are postponed to the future. So far, no one has dared to tackle the hot topics, such as the constantly increasing federal subsidy for pension insurance.

Saying no to the many extra wishes will be the main task of politics in the coming years. Even if that may seem unpopular at first.