Ghost Bundestag votes to dismantle the German debt brake, as Friedrich Merz succeeds in his scheme to authorise thousands of billions in deficit spending against the wishes of his own voters
Also open thread.
I’ll write more about what I think this means tomorrow, when regular posting schedule resumes, but I wanted to get this news out there right away, while it is fresh.
Three hours ago, the twentieth Bundestag – 81 days after its dissolution at the end of December – passed one of the most important bills in recent German history. This was a proposal to amend the constitution and dismantle our strict debt brake in all but name. The ghost parliament did what its freshly elected replacement could not, because the self-proclaimed “democratic parties” do not have the necessary supermajority to authorise unlimited deficit spending in the twenty-first Bundestag.
I’ve explained the details of the debt brake overhaul in prior posts, but I might as well explain them again, for the sake of completeness: Over the next twelve years, 100 billion Euros of debt will be funneled to states and municipalities, in part to ease the financial pain of mass migration. You might be thinking that this means there are no serious plans to put a stop to mass migration, and you would be right! Another 100 billion Euros will be poured into the dubious project of achieving “climate neutrality” by 2045, and yet another 300 billion Euros will go towards a nebulous and relentlessly undefined “infrastructure.”
That is already a lot of money, but it is not nearly the half of it. All defence spending in excess of 1% GDP will be exempted from the debt brake, and thanks to last-minute intervention of the Green Party, “defence” will be defined as broadly as possible for these purposes. This means that the present deficit spending package has no upper limit and nobody knows how much we have committed to piss away over the coming years. It might be a mere 1.5 trillion Euros, it might be 1.8 trillion Euros, and it might even be more. All we really know is that it will be a lot – at least as much debt as Germany has taken on over the past 60 years.
At the very least, German voters ought to have had a say in this decision, and yet the cartel parties have conspired to deny them any voice. The CDU and the CSU led the charge to dismantle the debt brake, even though they promised nothing but fiscal restraint throughout the campaign. There is breaking promises, and then there is what the Union parties did here – directly and openly reversing themselves on a core point of their own programme within days of the vote. They hammered out their plans to dismantle the debt brake in back rooms with the biggest losers of the election, the Social Democrats, and then to make their ghost Bundestag tactic work they gave the next-biggest losers of the election, the Green Party, everything they wanted too.
My very left leaning German friend is bemoaning the fact that there is no affordable housing, in fact, no housing AT ALL, available in the Aachen area. I tried explaining to her that the immigrants have it all and the government and her taxes are paying it, to no avail. She can’t believe it. But those hundreds of billions to be used to pay for immigration are just drops in the bucket. German citizens should be made fully aware of how much the German government is already forking over with their taxpayer money. I’ve watched the NY Post cover in great detail, that for whatever monies Hochul sent to Mayor Adams to pay for illegals and their housing. It was never enough. In 3 years alone, 2.3 billion was spent in just NYC alone. That doesn’t include any other the other costs, healthcare, education, etc. Germany is in an even bigger pickle. Many come from poor countries and are illiterate in their Muslim language. If they read at all, they read from right to left. Now try and teach them a whole new language, new moral code (remember the No No box from Finland) and reading from left to right. At least 207 voted against this nonsense, it would be interesting to see who those 207 are. On the other hand, one of my most fervent wishes might come true now- the EU Bloc crumbling. There was loud grumbling about the addition of Greece and it almost happened, but maybe now, when no one in the bloc has any money to share with the others, and they are all collective takers, it will finally crumble.
I guess 80 years of enforced self-hatred did their work.