leeway in budgeting
Greens expect more revenue
3/11/2023 2:51 am
The departments are reporting desires, the Federal Minister of Finance wants to talk about “financial realities” – the budget plans for 2024 promise to be anything but easy. The Greens assume that Lindner will soon have more to distribute than previously known.
The Greens budget expert Sven-Christian Kindler sees new leeway in the dispute in the traffic light coalition about the 2024 budget. “The next tax estimate should give some relaxation,” said the budgetary spokesman for the Greens parliamentary group of the editorial network Germany (RND). “The development is much better than expected.”
He was confident that the traffic light coalition would soon come to an agreement on the controversial basic parameters of the federal budget. “The fact that the benchmark decision was postponed is not wild, previous finance ministers have already done that. Of course there are different interests, but they can be resolved in the end,” he told the “Rheinische Post”.
It had previously become known that Finance Minister Christian Lindner intends to postpone the submission of his key figures for the 2024 budget. Originally, the budget plans were to be presented to the cabinet next Wednesday. “We will have to talk about financial realities together again in the cabinet,” said the FDP politician. He expressly does not name a new point in 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,” he told RND and the “Rheinische Post”.
The ideas of Lindner and several of his cabinet colleagues are so far apart that the Minister of Finance wants to talk again in principle. His fellow ministers had announced additional requests of 70 billion euros, for which Lindner, who insists on complying with the debt brake and refraining from tax increases, sees no leeway in the budget.