Ending Hartz IV?

Focus, the German news magazine, put a short piece yesterday.....talking over some political comments made within the SPD Party over German welfare (Hartz IV).

For those who aren't familiar with Hartz IV....it was the 'big' transformation of the old German welfare system about sixteen years ago.

The intention was take a bloated and ineffective welfare program which was leading toward a financial crisis in the decade ahead, and kinda 'force' people along to jobs.  In effective, the SPD (the creator of this system) felt that once you got to a marginal amount of money from the government, you'd suddenly wake up and desire to work. 

Well, most Germans will say that the idea (at least on paper) originally sold well.  After implementation....the grumbling started with the marginal amount of money.  That grumbling lingered.  Folks getting a desire to leave welfare?  Well.....no, that didn't really occur.  After about ten years, it became obvious that Germany was creating an entire class of poverty-residents, who not only had given up on work, but they were being identified as a sub-class of society.  Today, some numbers will suggest that about 15-percent of the kids in Germany are within families which are in the poverty class.

Reality TV shows in the past two years have picked up the topic and shown the fabric (or lack of fabric) of the Hartz IV people.

So Focus brought this topic up....that the SPD Secretary General....Lars Klingbeil....has said 'enough'.  The Hartz IV program, in his mind, needs to be gutted and completely reinvented.  Even the name....Hartz IV....is figured to be gutted.

Their intention?  There is some suggestion that they want to entice or force folks without job skills (figured to be a major part of the problems confronting the poverty crowd)....to go back in and get additional job training/schooling.  But part of this problem, at least from what I've observed, is that you need in each local town or community....some kind of 'coaching' where a guy who has been out of work for ten years, is dragged and pushed along to accept a new lifestyle. 

Will the program get delivered?  I suspect by summer of 2019....something will be unveiled, and discussed in terms of funding (maybe another couple billion a year for five years)....to get this crowd up, in some training program, and pushed off the welfare program. 

The odd part of this story is that there are actually empty work positions existing out there (more than one million potential jobs).  But another part of this story is that most require some training or background.....or movement from one part of the country to another (right now, Bavaria has a fair number of empty positions). 

Hartz IV a failure?  I don't think anyone wants to admit that.  If they hadn't cut the budget and forced the lower welfare payments....they'd have massive budget problems today.