Why more Germans can't afford life on their wages – DW – 06/27/2025
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German politicians are fond of saying, "Work must be worth it." But ever more full-time workers need state benefits, and the new minimum wage hike is seen as disappointing.

German politicians are fond of saying, “Work must be worth it.” But ever more people who work full-time need state benefits. And the new minimum wage hike is seen as disappointing.

  • velanox@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    12 hours ago

    It’s just sad that every politician from the GroKo is so fixated on lifting the minimum wage, which wouldn’t bring much at all in the big picture, instead of reducing the enormous amount of various taxes that has to be paid from everybody’s salary, which is currently around 40%. SPD even plans to increase the amount of taxes that the middle-class, everyone with an annual salary between 66k and 100k will have to pay. And the politicians sell this as “taxing the rich”.

    • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
      0·
      10 hours ago

      Think about the economy without money. There is a fixed amount of things that can be done with the available resources. That doesn’t change, no matter how wages or taxes are allocated. If taxes would decrease, inflation would compensate that.

      If we want more, we need more. Cheaper resources or more profits from our products.

      • velanox@feddit.orgEnglish
        0·
        9 hours ago

        This is definitely a point, but Germany’s problem with the inefficient retirement and government healthcare systems (96 government providers? WHY?!) is a snowball that’s been accelerating downhill for a long time and that needs to be addressed ASAP. The systems need to be reformed, otherwise we’re looking at exponentially rising costs for both of those systems that will have to be paid by the average citizen. The health insurance providers are running on fumes money-wise and have already had to increase the contribution factor significantly, and this is just the beginning. It’s ironic how SPD says “Wir dürfen uns keine Denkverbote auferlegen” (roughly meaning “We shouldn’t be closed to any new thoughts”) while suggesting to raise the health insurance assessment threshold from ~5500EUR/mo to ~8000EUR/mo, thus hitting middle-class even harder than it already is, without changing anything about the system itself. This is pretty much the “We’ve been doing this for a long time already, why change anything?” mentality that hit Germans very hard when they had cheap gas cut off after having relied on it for several decades.