German Poverty Report

There was a fairly big news item from ARD (Germany's public TV network) today.  The topic.....poverty and German kids.

The German federal ministry.....Family Affairs...came out and said after a long analysis period that one kid out of every five kids in Germany...live either in poverty, or on the edge of poverty.  As they note....nothing much has improved in the past decade....other than the numbers getting worse.

They figure 2.8 million kids under the age of 18....live in this situation.

You can drive around Germany...ride the city buses, and simply view the nature of society in 2017.  I compare my image against 1978...the first time I ever saw the landscape of Germany.  In those days, you had a fair sum of Germans that you classified as plain working-class Germans, and you rarely noted anyone that you'd consider poor or in poverty.

What's happened since 1978?  In my humble analysis.....it's a multi-level society today...with a fair number of wealthy Germans...a fair sum of upscale middle-class Germans....a fair sum of skill-craft Germans who do decent numbers with pay.....and then you come to the bottom level of poverty class folks.

This bottom level are people who've never been able to climb out....never had the skill sets or the certificates for better job-placement, and rarely found pay-raises to help lift them or their families.  You can blame simple circumstance, bad luck, your lack of training or schooling getting you to the next step, or the area of the country that you live in.  I've come to note that living around NRW (the northwest)....there's a higher unemployment rate, and companies don't need to advance pay much.  If you live in Bavaria?  A very low unemployment rate, limited apprentice kids, and a chance for advancing on pay every couple of years.

How this poverty thing affects Germany over the next decade?  The government needs to find some angle to drag a fair number of people out.  It means people-coaching....working up training programs to improve a guy's certificate situation....and working up some creative methods which avoid raising taxes yet again.

All of these 2.8 million kids.....will eventually go past age eighteen....and have voting power.  In some ways....it's begging for a political period of upheaval.