Lindner at Maischberger
“We must ask about the reasons for child poverty”
By Marko Schlichting
7/6/2023 5:22 am
It took a very long time for the traffic light coalition to present the draft for the 2024 federal budget. And unsurprisingly, a new dispute has broken out again. Finance Minister Lindner tries to smooth things over with Maischberger.
The top topic on Wednesday evening would actually have been the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court to stop the Bundestag vote on the Building Energy Act. But when the breaking news is sent through the agencies, the evening talks are already recorded. And so Sandra Maischberger doesn’t talk to Christian Lindner about heating, but about household chores. The Federal Minister of Finance presented the draft budget for 2024 on Monday. And promptly a fight breaks out again in the traffic light coalition. Lindner tries to settle it.
Lindner in economy mode
The federal budget for 2024 is evidence of the austerity measures that the Minister of Finance has imposed on himself. Lindner wants to comply with the debt brake, and that’s why he emphasizes: “Our funds are limited.” One cannot go on as in the past few years and accumulate more and more debt. Lindner’s predecessors have already recognized this, but the FDP minister now seems to want to get serious about it.
He also has another problem: Germany is in a recession. “Economic growth is declining and the order situation is no longer so good,” he says. Now it’s about restoring stability so that you can afford more later.
Lindner wanted to save on parental allowance – and implement a proposal from the Ministry of Family Affairs. After that, parental allowance should no longer be paid to rich families. In concrete terms: So far, families with a joint income of up to 300,000 euros per year have benefited from the benefit, from next year it should no longer be paid from a taxable annual income of 150,000 euros. That’s 12,500 euros a month, so you wouldn’t exactly meet families who would be threatened with social decline if they had to forego parental allowance. “These are not needy people,” says Lindner. According to the Family Ministry, a total of 20,000 families would be affected by the cuts, not quite one per thousand of the population.
The proposal for the cut came from the Ministry of Family Affairs, says Lindner. But now Family Minister Lisa Paus from the Greens no longer agrees. All ministries have a spending ceiling within which they can operate, the minister explains. He now wants to look for alternatives with Paus and experts so that this cut does not come about. This could pause the new traffic light dispute for the time being, one should hope.
“Now it’s a matter of prioritizing”
It will no longer be possible to finance everything in the future, Lindner says over and over again. “Now it’s about setting priorities.” The same applies to basic child security. “You have to approach the matter realistically. We have made the highest increase in child benefit since 1996. We have a child allowance and an immediate child allowance. That’s billions more than were available for children and families in 2021,” emphasizes Lindner.
However, there is a problem with the child supplement: families still do not call it off, even though they have a right to it. Now a digitized procedure should be set up to end this situation, and for this the Minister for Family Affairs Paus should get 100 million euros. According to Lindner, the experts in the Federal Ministry of Finance have calculated that the state would have to spend two billion euros more if all parents received the child supplement. Now it is also about an increase in performance.
But Lindner is skeptical: “We have to ask about the reasons for child poverty. Too often they are the parents’ unemployment, their lack of integration into the labor market and their language skills.” That is why the minister wants to have it checked whether the payment of basic child security really improves the children’s chances. It is also unclear to him where the necessary money is supposed to come from. According to Lindner, Minister Paus will present a corresponding concept in August. “And I want a good concept that ensures that children have the best chances.”