If the money is not enough, the government raises taxes or runs into debt: Minister of Finance Lindner vowed to German small and medium-sized enterprises that the lax times of expansive financial policy should be over. He compares his new budget discipline with the high art of Michelangelo.
In the traffic light debate about the federal budget and the financing of various projects, Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner reiterated his rejection of tax increases on the one hand and new debts on the other. “There will be no tax increases,” he said in the afternoon at an event organized by the federal association “Der Mittelstand” (BVMW) in Berlin. “You can write me letters, you can call me, (…) you can send messages in a bottle, you can invent smoke signals (…), my ceterum censeo is: We already have such a high tax burden in Germany that politics has to learn to manage with the money you give her.”
Lindner also said that after years of running into debt, now is the time to exit the expansive financial policy. “We simply can no longer afford additional debt, because otherwise the interest rates will strangle us at some point.” That means talking anew about priorities and subordination. “It’s the chance to decide what’s really necessary.”
In the context of the budget deliberations, the coalition is currently arguing about which projects are to be financed and to what extent. For example, the subject of basic child security is controversial between the FDP and the Greens. Lindner drew a comparison to the famous Renaissance artist Michelangelo. When asked how he made a wonderful statue out of a large block of marble, he once replied that he simply removed the superfluous. “And in this sense, you can also imagine the Federal Minister of Finance as an artist who simply removes the superfluous from the demands so that what is really essential is retained.”
However, it is not the first time that Lindner has attempted the bold comparison with the Italian maestro. In a general debate in the Bundestag in 2018, the head of the FDP accused the grand coalition and its finance minister, Olaf Scholz, of not having handled the essentials properly. “What Olaf Scholz presented as a draft budget is a blank block, without ideas and without design!” Lindner said at the time from the opposition.
The Federal Court of Auditors had warned the federal government in the morning of a financial loss of control. The mountain of debt has now grown to 2.1 trillion euros. “This dynamic and its consequences threaten to seriously jeopardize the sustainability of federal finances and thus also the state’s ability to act,” said Kay Scheller, President of the Court of Auditors. In order to keep the reins of action in hand, the federal government must reprioritize all expenditure and consistently align the budget with the core tasks.
