Go in small, come out big – that’s how Finance Minister Christian Lindner wants to prepare the population for hard, oh what, hardest times. On Twitter he writes that people, all of us, have to work more. Which means: in view of the current crisis(s), more overtime.
Of course, that has something to do with the fact that Lindner doesn’t want any tax increases, for better or for worse. If he did that in addition to the many new debts – then good night, FDP, the party chairman probably fears.
But if Lindner – by the way, the Green competitor Robert Habeck as Federal Minister of Economics too – wants to really swear the Germans into a long phase of deprivation, then not via Twitter. At least not alone. You need something else for that, preferably in a public forum. The Bundestag is not some kind of official secret event of the republic.
But of course, the contradiction to his ideas can be pushed away more easily in the short message service. Not in the long run. The Minister of Finance is also aware that many Germans are already working a lot of overtime in many areas. That overtime cannot simply be ordered by the state. And that they don’t make up for the labor shortage.
If at all, overtime can only be done by mutual agreement, i.e. when the employee and the employer agree that they have to do it all together in order to make it through the crisis. Although that cannot be the only recipe, but that is also logical.
Lindner paints three, four, five years of scarcity as warning signs on the wall. That’s quite an announcement. But if it gets even harsher, people still won’t get started like the fire brigade. Rather, they will become afraid and anxious. Confidence in politics is definitely not growing that way.
But the SPD already has that on the screen. She pretty much drains him, the small coalition partner. From their point of view, this is not worth discussing. The Minister of Labor does not say it himself, but a spokesman directs it. Gossip, a slap.
Maybe instead talk about one thing and let the left come up with it: the 70 billion euros in dividends that are paid in Germany. In these times. Good to be reminded. That looks strange in contrast, doesn’t it? Maybe something could be done here for the cash-strapped state that would help everyone. Putting something like this together would definitely cost the Treasury overtime.