Second taboo after the debt brake
FDP politician does not rule out tax increases
November 24, 2023, 6:26 p.m
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Two long-held taboos of the FDP are shaking after the ruling from Karlsruhe. Now that Lindner has cleared the way for easing the debt brake, tax increases are no longer ruled out.
The FDP budget expert Otto Fricke no longer wants to rule out tax increases in view of the budget crisis. “We will also have to talk about this part, how we can improve income,” said the FDP member of the Bundestag on the Welt TV channel in the afternoon. The desire for revenue improvements is expressed in the coalition by the partners SPD and the Greens. For the FDP, tax increases have so far been absolutely taboo. “Anyone who is already predicting what won’t work doesn’t want to negotiate,” said Fricke. According to the Federal Constitutional Court’s debt ruling, all traffic light parties would have to show a “willingness to compromise”. What is now necessary is “mutual giving in, but from all sides.”
Fricke pointed out that improvements in revenue do not automatically have to be accompanied by a tax increase. They could also be achieved by reviewing subsidies or a higher carbon price. In his own words, Fricke thinks this is better than tax increases followed by redistribution.
Fricke further said that the willingness to make difficult compromises that he had called for must apply to all partners in the coalition – especially in view of the demands of the SPD and the Greens that there should be no compromises when it comes to social spending such as citizen’s benefit or basic child welfare. The task of the “traffic light” is now: “We have to look at the same time: Can we really do everything that we wanted to do? Or do we just have to make compromises here?”
Kubicki against suspending the debt brake
Tax increases, as well as suspending the debt brake, have so far been taboos for FDP leader and Finance Minister Christian Lindner. As a consequence of the Karlsruhe ruling, the traffic light coalition wants to suspend the debt brake again this year. Lindner announced a supplementary budget on Thursday. With a supplementary budget for this year, the government will “propose a resolution to the Bundestag to declare an exceptional emergency situation for the year 2023,” wrote Lindner in the online service X. This is the prerequisite for suspending the debt brake. The SPD and the Greens supported the decision.
There is already resistance in the FDP. FDP federal deputy Wolfgang Kubicki told the Funke newspapers that “in my opinion, such a step is difficult to convey.” Although a renewed suspension of the debt brake is legally possible, it would create “significant trust problems.”
Instead, Kubicki called for a paradigm shift in budget policy. It is imperative to talk about reducing certain government spending. “The fact that we are paying well over 30 billion euros for development aid, for example, is difficult to convey given the seriousness of the budgetary problem,” said the Vice President of the Bundestag. However, for Kubicki, leaving the FDP from the traffic light coalition is out of the question. “The Free Democrats are not shirking their responsibility,” he said.