Quarrel over next household
Lindner lets the Greens and SPD fidget
03/11/2023 4:43 p.m
The dispute over the 2024 federal budget is more difficult than it has been for ten years, says the Federal Minister of Finance. While Lindner sees the SPD and Greens on the move to rethink their projects, the latter do not see things quite so narrowly because of the tax increase.
In the coalition dispute over the 2024 federal budget, Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner is increasing the pressure on the coalition partners SPD and Greens. “I will only go into the cabinet when I have a realistic draft budget,” Lindner told the “Welt am Sonntag”. The minister had postponed the presentation of the key budget figures planned for Wednesday at short notice. From his point of view, nothing has failed. “But we have to advise more fundamentally,” said Lindner.
The finance minister stressed that he was not under any pressure to come to an agreement. “On the contrary, the colleagues must have an interest in a quick agreement, since their financially effective projects cannot be pushed forward without a budget.” After years of emergency loans, reserves and zero interest rates, the real financial situation is now visible: “We have strong income, but expenses are increasing far too quickly. This state has a cost problem.”
The situation cannot be compared with any budget advice in the past ten years, Lindner said. When asked whether he was aiming for an austerity retreat in the cabinet, in which every minister had to put something on the table, he said he would “submit proposals for further action” to Chancellor Olaf Scholz. In the summer of 2010, the then black and yellow federal government under Angela Merkel agreed on a comprehensive austerity package. The ministers of the traffic light government had announced spending requests to Lindner that were around 70 billion euros above the previously agreed financial plan.
Left: Massive problems without super-rich taxation
The Greens budget politician Sven-Christian Kindler sees new scope in the federal budget in view of the expected additional tax revenue. “The next tax estimate should give some relaxation,” he told the RND newspapers. “The development is much better than expected.” At the same time, Kindler called for the reduction of climate-damaging subsidies: “Especially in times of the climate crisis, the reduction of climate-damaging subsidies would bring a double dividend: for the budget and for our livelihoods.”
The Greens health politician Paula Piechotta demanded higher grants from the federal budget for long-term care and health insurance and warned of an additional burden on contributors. All SPD-led ministries must work “much more forcefully” to ensure compliance with the coalition agreement, she also demanded in the RND newspapers.
The left-wing faction’s financial policy spokesman, Christian Görke, spoke of a “structural imbalance in the federal budget”. The expenditure problem was also caused by “numerous wrong decisions” in recent years. “At the same time, we also have massive revenue problems due to the non-levying of a wealth tax for the super-rich, massive inheritance tax gifts or the waiver of sales tax on stock market products,” he explained. These three measures alone would mean revenue improvements of almost 48 billion euros per year, emphasized Görke.