It's just sad that every politician from the GroKo is so fixated on lifting the minimum wage, which wouldn't bring much at all in the big picture, instead of reducing the enormous amount of various taxes that has to be paid from everybody's salary, which is currently around 40%. SPD even plans to increase the amount of taxes that the middle-class, everyone with an annual salary between 66k and 100k will have to pay. And the politicians sell this as "taxing the rich".
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
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lifting the minimum wage, which wouldn’t bring much at all in the big picture, instead of reducing the enormous amount of various taxes that has to be paid from everybody’s salary
Lifting the minimum wage directly impacts the available income of the lowest income classes, who in turn spend most of their income on consumption, increasing domestic demand and thus also helping the economy.
Also, higher minimum wage gives unions a better position to argue for higher wages for their members. That in turn can put pressure on the general non-unionized wage level through competition for qualified labor, which we are told is in such short supply ("Fachkräftemangel").
Reducing income tax on the other hand primarily benefits those who pay the highest income taxes, i.e. those with high income.
Those people can afford not to spend their entire income but will instead put some if not most of these gains into personal savings, which effectively removes the money from economic circulation and does not help the economy.
Also extremely low incomes do not even pay income tax and thus would not benefit at all.
tl,dr Higher mix wage is good for everyone (at least everyone who lives off labor) and primarily helps the poor, lower income tax is only good for some and primarily benefits those with high income.
None of the really "tax the rich".
Although I would argue that a higher general wage level can help redistribute wealth from the rich to the working class.
Hahahahaha! The core middle-class consists of people earning between about 1.850 EUR and 3.470 EUR for a single person.
Come one, is it you, Fritze Merz?
Think about the economy without money. There is a fixed amount of things that can be done with the available resources. That doesn't change, no matter how wages or taxes are allocated. If taxes would decrease, inflation would compensate that.
If we want more, we need more. Cheaper resources or more profits from our products.
This is definitely a point, but Germany's problem with the inefficient retirement and government healthcare systems (96 government providers? WHY?!) is a snowball that's been accelerating downhill for a long time and that needs to be addressed ASAP. The systems need to be reformed, otherwise we're looking at exponentially rising costs for both of those systems that will have to be paid by the average citizen. The health insurance providers are running on fumes money-wise and have already had to increase the contribution factor significantly, and this is just the beginning. It's ironic how SPD says "Wir dürfen uns keine Denkverbote auferlegen" (roughly meaning "We shouldn't be closed to any new thoughts") while suggesting to raise the health insurance assessment threshold from ~5500EUR/mo to ~8000EUR/mo, thus hitting middle-class even harder than it already is, without changing anything about the system itself. This is pretty much the "We've been doing this for a long time already, why change anything?" mentality that hit Germans very hard when they had cheap gas cut off after having relied on it for several decades.
Unpopular opinion, but I actually like the competitive landscape in public health care in Germany. IMHO this is the best example for capitalism: you define exactly what each company has to deliver, and they can compete on:
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pricing
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service
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additional benefits
The nature of the strong regulation here makes them compete on actual relevant things, and they can’t externalize the costs (mostly).
I actually believe having just one public health care company would result in a worse service.
I would rather focus on the ridiculous increase in wealth inequality, in Germany, and around the globe. That’s the root of all evil.
Competiton is always good for the consumer, sure, but too much of it is wasted money. It should be maybe 5-6 Krankenkassen, maybe bump that to 8-9, but this should be in no case a double-digit number. This is in my eyes the sweet spot for both preventing the formation of a cartell and simultaneously offering a wide range of services.
Just think about it, the current 96 companies all have to have their own C-suite, most likely several hundreds of employees - for what? This is a huge waste.
About 95% of the money spent by the public health insurance company is „Leistungsausgaben“, I.e., paying out people for health related costs.
You can’t optimize that away, even when combining the companies. The remaining 5% is overhead. Having worked in a big company, I can tell you that big companies are not that much more efficient than small companies. In fact, the overhead is often even larger since there is lots more cross-communication involved between departments. In the end, everyone that is now a CEO would be an SVP instead, and barely anything would change.
No mention of unaffordable rents massively increasing the cost of living.
The MSM is the same everywhere. Their oligarch-owners goal is to distract from the fact that the orphan crushing machine is identical everywhere.
Meanwhile, the productivity gains of the last 5 decades means that a 3 day work week should be the norm; instead, we'll be lucky to retire at all if we live to 70.
This is not a Germany thing. It's an everywhere thing, because the problem is capitalism and the wealth inequality it enables.
DW is not mainstream media owned by oligarchs, it's funded by taxes.
DW is run by the federal government to further the image of Germany abroad. It is the equivalent in organization to Russia Today, Radio Free Europe and other government run foreign media outlets.
DW wants to promote an image of an open and discussive Germany, so they pick up on some issues as a reaction to the German issues already having become known, but they will not be proactive about it, e.g. run investigative Journalism.
Especially in regards to Palestine there have been huge turmoil as the DW arabic staff got very upset with the narratives they were told to push and now DW is backtracking a bit to not loose too much face with arabic speakers.
DW is run by the federal government to further the image of Germany abroad. It is the equivalent in organization to Russia Today, Radio Free Europe and other government run foreign media outlets.
Russia Today is a pure propaganda machine that was proven to present false information as facts multiple times. I'm not aware of DW being accused of that outside of Russia.
I don't really care about DW, but the previous poster implied it's oligarch-run mainstream media. It's not.
Why more Germans can’t afford life on their wages
Easy! It is because Germans vote for exactly that. Again and again and again.
If it's anything like my country, it's also a lack of offering issue...
The left party has had a consistent affordable living and long term inhrastructure investment program.
But they are successfully attacked by the alliance from far right to supposed "liberal" press and politicians on a basis of "stealing peoples income", "doesnt work in practice", "evil communists", "Putin friends", "lgbt lifestyle party" and other attacks.
Meanwhile parties like the social democrats or greens have moved significantpy to the right, embracing neolibetalism and since a few years open Racism and unconstitutional authoritarianism.
Like in the US on the federal level these "progressive liberals" would rather bring the fascists to power than embrace "left" policies. Note that a lot of whatbis now attacked as "left" used to be standard among conservatives in the 50s-70s when it comes to taxation and public investment.
"Nur die allerdümmsten Kälber wählen ihre Metzger selber." As true today as it was back in Berthold's days.
Turns out, almost all do.
German efficincy