The baker in the neck


WWhen Robert Habeck says “What I want to say by that”, he usually says something different from what was said before. You are not prepared for this at first. “What I mean to say” is actually a rhetorical signal to say the same thing again, only simpler. Habeck, meanwhile, flees with the alleged comprehension aid “What do I want to say with that” from a confusion with complexities that he had previously unfolded in order to talk nonsensical things apart.

Oh well, one thinks to oneself, only just taken aback when contradictions threatened to drown in a sea of ​​distinctions. Well, Habeck basically just wanted to say this and that – well then! Well, then you don’t want to bother the Minister for Economic Affairs any further, don’t ask again, don’t point out mistakes in the previous arguments.

The Habeck twist didn’t work for Maischberger. Ms. Maischberger was cold-blooded enough to take the Economics Minister at his word when he tried several times on this show to cover up the traces of his words by saying: “What I want to say with that”. In other words: Arriving at the baker’s was the end of the field for Habeck.

It was about the finding that the recently agreed relief package left small and medium-sized businesses out in the rain, as a quote from the German Association of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises makes clear: “The reduction in VAT on gas or the electricity price brake, which has hardly been specified so far, primarily relieve private consumers. An energy-intensive bakery, for example, is almost completely left behind by the relief measures.”

What does Habeck mean by that?

Habeck initially rejected the medium-sized objection. In doing so, he simply turned around the argument of medium-sized companies that they would fall through the net of relief, i.e. not be caught at all by the federal government’s aid package. The apparent omission was justified by the fact that they first wanted to fine-tune the funding because otherwise there was a risk that the bakery in question would not be caught. Habeck sees that with an overall costly production, it is the high energy costs that – “like the drop that makes the camel overflow” – can now checkmate a medium-sized company.

Instead of relieving this company, whose cost bucket is about to overflow, with a subsidy of whatever title and thus catching it, Habeck would first like to rack the brains of the baker for what exactly he is using the subsidy for, whether for the costs of rollers, staff or Energy: “If you sometimes only look at the energy share of sales, you don’t get the industries at all because other costs are so much higher.”

But you only don’t catch the industries if you don’t pay them anything at all. Conversely, you get caught if you pay them anything at all, and without the need for a precisely worked out specification, as Habeck has in mind – as a condition, so to speak, for bureaucratically cleanly classified support, which in turn, if you understand the Minister of Economics correctly, only in is able to ensure accuracy to save a bakery from bankruptcy.

Well Done or Just Well Believed?

What he wanted to say, Habeck said, on the one hand rhetorically covering up the previous omission, on the other hand gaining time for catch-up support for small and medium-sized enterprises, was the following: “that the energy price reduction programs should also be opened up for small and medium-sized enterprises, so that’s happening now”. Oh well, if that happens now, if that’s what Habeck wanted to say, then let it be, then Habeck’s previously presented complicated theory of getting caught shouldn’t be put on the gold scales.

Habeck obviously only wants to say “that we don’t make a program where we (only) believe we’ve done something good, and in truth we don’t catch those actually affected”. As I said, every bakery whose camel overflows with the drop in energy costs will be caught precisely at the moment when it is included in the relief package, and that’s happening now, Habeck says. And wouldn’t that actually be well done and not just well believed? Maischberger followed up on this tenor.

In such a way that Habeck, with the medium-sized baker breathing down his neck, was again (perhaps for the last time?) startled at the prospect of “possibly not catching those who have to be caught, so what I want to say is: We’re working flat out with the right solution.” Of course, theoretically “the baker could pass on his prices through higher bread roll costs, but only theoretically, because people would then avoid things and say: I’ll just buy from a discount store or buy toast.” And who would want that? In theory, nobody wants that. The rescue of the baker is Habeck’s declared goal.

The technical implementation of this goal is of course still pending. Dirk Wiese, deputy parliamentary group leader of the SPD, was cheeky enough when he recently said: “The Habeck principle works like this: Appearance ready for film, technical implementation questionable, and in the end the citizen pays for it.” What is the point of the quote? At Maischberger it was projected onto the studio wall.

It is sometimes said that a Habeck searching for words, explaining his words, lets people watch him think. Which is just to say that Habeck’s thinking was in front of everyone at Maischberger.



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