Saturday, September 4th 2021
Corona aid should end quickly
Laschet wants to return to the debt brake
The economy continues to recover from the Corona crisis. According to Union Chancellor candidate Laschet, the financial burden on the state must be reduced accordingly soon. Companies should soon no longer be able to claim any help for this.
Union Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet is in favor of a speedy end to corona aid for companies. “The goal must be a quick return to normal economy,” Laschet told the newspapers of the Funke media group. The state could “not provide these great achievements for years”. “The economy is just beginning to pick up,” Laschet emphasized. If this succeeds, “the economic aid caused by the pandemic would also end”. Tax increases are taboo in this situation. Corresponding plans of the SPD “choke off the tender upswing,” warned the CDU chief.
When asked whether he would make the waiver of tax increases a condition of the coalition, Laschet replied to the Funke Medien: “The future coalition must act economically. That is why it must not raise taxes. That would be poison for everyone.” Rather, it must be achieved “that everyone can work, that short-time working is ended, people get out of unemployment and then everyone shares in the prosperity”. At the same time, Laschet insisted on compliance with the debt brake. “There are exceptions to the pandemic. But to be sustainable, as dictated by the Basic Law, must shape our financial policy,” said the CDU leader. Therefore, Germany must “return to the debt brake very quickly”. The North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister assured him that he was in agreement with CSU boss Markus Söder.
Laschet rejected criticism of the Union’s plans to abolish the solidarity surcharge for high earners. “The solidarity surcharge was introduced for a specific purpose and when that purpose is fulfilled, politicians cannot simply say: we don’t care,” he said. The Union’s stance on this issue has “something to do with credibility” and is “constitutionally required”. For reasons of social justice, the Union would then lower taxes for small and medium incomes.
Three weeks before the federal elections, Union Chancellor candidate Laschet is under massive pressure. In the ZDF “Politbarometer” on Friday for the first time in almost two decades, the SPD was back in front of the Union. For the Social Democrats, 25 percent of the citizens want to vote in the polls on September 26, for the CDU / CSU, however, only 22 percent.
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