Tomorrow (Wed), a special commission of the German government (having CDU, CSU and SPD party members)....will deliver a product that will discuss the problems of a unequal Germany. I know...it's a weird topic.
So, for years, there's been this discussion that various communities and regions in Germany....simply aren't at the same level or 'beauty' as other areas. It's not even a West Germany versus East Germany thing.....you can drive through villages, towns, urban areas which have bike paths, great landscaped parks, and tranquil things that impact the local population. Yet you drive forty-five minutes away, and find a town of the same size....lacking and in some cases.....looks the same as it did in 1980.
Most people would suggest that the leadership of the towns that progressed made a difference.....some would suggest that local industry thrived and put money into the pockets of the locals, who paid property taxes, and helped the town progress. The lesser towns had industry which dissolved in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s.....and just never progressed beyond that point.
Even if you agreed about this unequal 'mess'.....how would you fund it?
Well....the Soli-tax (the Solidarity Tax created by Chancellor Kohl in the early 1990s) is supposed to run out shortly. The tax was developed as a 30-year project to renovate East Germany. Roughly a billion each year went into the tax bucket and paid for upgrades. The chief target of the tax? It was a 5.5-percent added income tax, upon the more wealthy and upper-middle-class. Kohl wrote the tax with an end-date.
The belief by some is that Chancellor Merkel will hype up passing a permanent structure to the Soli-tax, and aim it to handle special projects for communities.
Germans wanting the Soli-tax to end? Well, that's another interesting discussion. Virtually all polls done over the question of ending the Soli-tax.....have shown a majority (some as high as 80-percent....some near two-thirds)....in supporting of ending it.
Logic would dictate you asking how you find these 'unblessed' communities and label them.....then ask the question of how a billion Euro a year could be used to update or cure the ills of this community. Who would be in charge of the labels, and who would approve the budget projects? Would Stuttgart and Munich try to sneak in and get funding for things? Would small towns fund projects with no real return value?
I've traveled a lot over Germany in the past thirty years. I have no doubt that under-classed towns exist. Some of them have seen a population decrease in every decade since the 1960s. In some cases, you could flood 300-million Euro into a community, and it really wouldn't help much at all. In other cases, by upgrading the local railway line, you could suddenly develop a 8,000 person town into a magnet community, and within a decade....have a new population of 16,000 people.
So stand by to observe the continuation of the Soli-tax.
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