Last night, the public TV forum 'Anne Will' ran on ARD (German public TV, Channel One) at 9:45 PM. The subject? The taxation rate that is now drawing upon the middle-class, and the funding problems that now exist in Germany.
This was a fairly dramatic, and chaotic hour-long discussion, with a two 'experts' and three political figures, and of course....Anne Will, the moderator.
I'll make four observations over the discussions:
1. Most Germans now believe that the 'problems-list' now outweighs the 'funding-list'. You can ask about the number of issues existing, which need resolution, and be fairly shocked at the list that Germans will come up with.
If you bring up the continual rise of electrical costs, affordable housing in urbanized areas, or increasing welfare chaos.....everyone is agreed, these all need to be fixed.
2. The political spectrum on taxation? It goes from one extreme to the other.
3. The fact that mega projects (Stuttgart-21, the BER Airport in Berlin, the Hamburg Opera House) are all money-pits, which fantastic amounts of capital thrown in and all double in costs as time goes by? It's more than obvious and a national problem now.
4. It's just odd how this issue has increased in size and scoop.....all throughout the Merkel-period. I won't necessarily blame her agenda or performance, but the general public has increased it's perception and it's negativity during this period.
The coupling of East Germany to West Germany over the past thirty years? In some ways, that triggered various issues to start up and they've never actually recovered from that.
The odds that this will be one of the top five themes of the 2021 national election period? It's pretty high. The amusing thing is that employment is going well, the economy is actually performing at a decent rate, and Germans consider the past decade to have been good. Most countries would be begging for a landscape like this.
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