The traffic light coalition is currently feverishly looking for alternatives to the gas levy, which it decided itself and which will make end customers responsible from October in order to save gas importers like Uniper. The problem with this is that large sums of money have to be raised somehow. Finance minister and head of the FDP Christian Lindner has publicly stated that he absolutely wants to comply with the debt brake again next year. There are these options:
special assets
The calls, especially from the SPD and the Greens, for a special fund are getting louder – like the 100 billion euros recently for modernizing the Bundeswehr. Such a pot would not be taken into account when calculating the debt brake, and Lindner had already chosen this path to arm the German armed forces after the Russian attack on Ukraine. Critics complain that the special fund is a kind of shadow budget and that the debt brake is being softened as a result.
Funding from the budget
Greens co-boss Ricarda Lang demands from Lindner that if there is no special fund, financing must be provided through the budget. The gas levy is intended to collect more than 30 billion euros to support importers who are making high losses due to the lack of deliveries from Russia because they have to procure gas elsewhere at short notice and at much higher prices. Because of the planned nationalization of Uniper – and possibly also of Sefe, i.e. Gazprom Germania – it is no longer considered politically feasible that consumers should raise the money. According to Economics Minister Robert Habeck, the costs for the expensive procurement of replacement energy this year will be a good 60 billion euros and next year almost 100 billion again.
According to Lindner, he still has buffers in the household. From this he wants to finance the announced measures from the third relief package. However, tax revenue has recently not flowed as lavishly as it did at the beginning of the year. In August, federal and state tax receipts fell for the first time this year after roughly stagnating in July. For the first eight months, however, there was still an increase of almost 13 percent – an expression of inflation-related additional government revenue. The leeway could now become smaller because the economy is increasingly clouding over. Because Germany is more affected than other European countries by the economic effects of the war.
gas price brake
Lindner himself brought a gas price brake into play. However, how this could be structured is still open – as is its financing. However, Lindner does not want to make any exceptions to the debt rule in the Basic Law. It would be conceivable to skim off special profits from some companies in the energy crisis, which is planned anyway, and use them for this purpose. But here, too, the details are still open.
Suspend the debt brake in 2022
The debt brake is still suspended this year – due to the consequences of the corona pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Some of the leading traffic light politicians are pushing internally to use this tool this year. Lindner could still raise tens of billions of euros here, which could then be used to cushion the burden of high energy prices and expand the protective shields for companies and public utilities. For Lindner, however, this would be a difficult maneuver because he has repeatedly emphasized that priorities have to be set and that new debt is the wrong way to go in times of high inflation.