With the debt brake, politics ties itself like Odysseus to the mast – to resist the lure of borrowed money. But the shackles are not too tight, as the gas price brake shows. What does the Basic Law say about this?
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Wolfgang Janisch, Karlsruhe
The term debt brake is part of Christian Lindner’s core vocabulary, but the Federal Minister of Finance has also just learned a new word – gas price brake. It is inversely proportional to the debt brake: if you brake the gas price, you accelerate the debt. Because nothing else are the 200 billion euros, with which the prices are now trying to be pushed. So in mathematics it would be clear that you can’t have both, but in politics it’s different. The gas price brake will be introduced this year, and the debt brake will be observed next year. That’s Lindner’s promise.