Thursday, December 12, 2019

Budgets and Numbers Story

This is a fact that I stumbled upon this morning, when looking at economic data for Germany since the early 1990s (since unification).

If you use TradingEconomics data, there's been a German budget 'surplus' for only seven years since the early 1990s.  Oddly enough, since 2014, they've been on a roll, with consecutive year after year surplus money existing at the end of each year (I know, for most countries, it's near impossible).

Presently, as the numbers hold....the budget is amounting to roughly 1.2-percent of the GDP. 

The budget for 2020?  362 billion Euro (about five billion higher than last year).  The odds that the tax revenue collection will leave more in the pot than anticipated?  Some Germans would suggest that. 

Who gets the bulk of the money?  Ministry of health and social aid.

What got turned down in this latest budget battle?  Well, it's kind of an odd item to bring up but the Green Party wanted something called 'gender budgeting' to occur.  They wanted the federal and state governments to provide data of their budgets and how it related to men, and women (separate buckets of money).  Yes, it would have been an analytical vehicle to talk about gender equality in budget delivery.   One can sit and laugh over the enormous amount of data collection required for this, but they were clearly serious and wanted fairness to prevail. 

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