DThe Chancellor has already realized that things are not that simple. For a long time, the traffic light government acted as if it could implement the new German pace it was striving for almost single-handedly, of all things from the federal level, which makes the vast majority of laws but implements very few of them itself. A more efficient, more digital, faster bureaucracy: Berlin can perhaps still achieve this when it comes to procuring military equipment, but when it comes to building permits and tax assessments, this cannot be done without the states and municipalities.
That’s why Olaf Scholz has now turned the Germany Pace into a Germany Pact, an appeal to the Prime Ministers from Kiel to Munich to please join in with the scratch-free jogging program for the Republic. The opposition and government parties reacted with the usual reflexes of the federal system: They played the ball back into the opponent’s field and in turn attacked the federal government for its previous inaction.
Many citizens will agree with what Scholz said in the Bundestag on Wednesday: “In the time when we are planning to extend a single subway line or a high-rise building, in some countries in Asia or America, entire express train lines and “New neighborhoods were built,” he complained. “Citizens are tired of this standstill. And so am I.”
Every special case should be taken into account
The question, however, is whether the citizens quoted by Scholz – as well as the Chancellor himself – are really just unwilling victims of abstract conditions. Or whether they have not brought about the current blockage with their own wishes and demands. And whether the much-lamented jungle of paragraphs was so rampant because anything else would have been punished by the population in elections.
The obstacles that politics regularly encounters have their roots in two very German preferences: the striving for justice for every special case, no matter how complicated, and the desire to either exclude every risk from the outset or at least hold someone responsible afterwards has violated a regulation.
This is how the Krefeld entrepreneur Lutz Goebel sees it, for example. He chairs the Regulatory Control Council, which is tasked with making proposals for reducing bureaucracy on behalf of the federal government. He cites the basic pension as an example of the pursuit of justice in individual cases. “Only those who do not have capital gains are entitled to this. Now it is very rare for someone to have low retirement income and at the same time receive high interest and dividends,” he says. “We were able to prove that the effort required to check this is eight times greater than the possible magnitude of the abuse.” The state still wants to check it – also for fear of public outcry if a wealthy person does receive social benefits.
Tax law as a prime example
This is most clearly evident in tax law. There is no longer any talk of the plans for a system with three tax rates without exceptions, which Angela Merkel and her shadow finance minister Paul Kirchhof propagated during the 2005 election campaign. Today’s CDU chairman Friedrich Merz has long since moved away from the tax return on the beer mat that he brought into play twenty years ago. There’s not even talk of an easy-to-use tax app like in some other countries.
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