A few weeks ago, I essayed a piece over the 'great' success of the Basic Pension idea....where one to two million Germans with marginalized pensions (making less than a 1,000 Euro a month) were going to be 'gifted' by the Bundestag with a solution. A tax was going to be created....upon the rich-people (funny how these solutions always come with increased taxation). This circled around the idea of taxing stock purchases.
Well...the whole idea depended upon the EU making it a EU-wide thing because if they limited it to just Germany.....investors would have packed up their money and moved it beyond the German border. The EU's comments over the weekend? This is a no-go, period.
The Basic Pension idea? I sat and watched a piece this morning on N-TV (commercial German news).
The CDU (Merkel's party) has stood up and said this whole Basic Pension plan is crapped out, and they won't support it.
For the SPD Party (the left-of-center folks)? It's a pretty dismal position to be in....they made a big deal of helping out the marginal pension folks, and now can't deliver. Hurting them for the 2021 national campaign? Absolutely.
There is one other odd footnote about this whole 'failure'. For any of this financial transaction tax to have worked (effectively).....the government needed to go out and hire up at least a thousand employees to oversee this program. At this point in time....these people don't exist on the books, and if you were going to start this in 11 months time....you'd have to start the hiring process very shortly, and go into the training period by mid-summer. Even on that process....the SPD folks seemed to have missed the boat.
No comments:
Post a Comment