Some restaurants are fighting for survival. But there is no longer any sensible reason to give them preferential tax treatment. In a market economy, companies must be able to go bankrupt without taxpayers’ help.
Of course, tax increases are unpopular. For this reason they should be fair. In German tax law, one can argue in many areas about the extent to which politicians follow this commandment. But in this case, lamentation is out of the question: the federal government’s decision to increase the VAT on food in restaurants and cafés from seven percent back to 19 percent at the turn of the year is a fair regulatory measure. Since the end of the Corona pandemic, there is no longer any reasonable reason to give the catering industry tax preferential treatment.