this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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My question is why is the climate crisis not considered a crisis big enough to break the debt limit whereas the covid crisis was, this has been the hottest summer ever, by a lot, let's see next year's, when it's too late.
I hope you enjoyed it, it might have been the coolest summer for the rest of our lives!
Because in the eyes of the constitutional court it's not an unforeseeable, acute crisis, but something that is known since decades :(
Legally: because it didn’t happen suddenly and the law only allows exceptions if a crisis happens suddenly.
Much simpler: The reason was A. You cannot use A-excpetion to fund B
A=covid
B=climate, industry, future, ...
Because it's a 'frog in the hot water' kind of crisis vs a 'frog in the fire' kind of crisis.
Why is it always the poor frogs? 😭
Ukraine war and inflation could have served as reasons to break the debt limit, but the FDP was strictly against that. They think they can gain voters by strictly adhering to the debt limit.
Probably because one is an immediate, temporary crisis and the other is a general, long-lasting, global-scale crisis, where increasing the federal budget doesn't seem to have a short-term effect to mitigate the negative effects
That's not the point here.
This decision of the court didn't try to make any political point or find a solution, it was only asked to decide, whether moving funds (or more precisely: grants to take on loans) was legal or not.
Now politics kicks in and they're supposed to find a solution that's actually legal for a change.
German politics is an absolute shit show right now.
“ German politics is an absolute shit show right now” just a matter of perspective
Indeed. This article is nonsense. Germany should declare the climate crises an emergency. And if they don't like the debt limit rule they passed a few years ago, they can change it. Calling it a 'budget crisis' is overblown. It seems that the main problem is that their political parties are currently not working together well. That is not exactly some existential problem at this point. The German economy is way too large to consider a 60 billion euro problem a 'crisis'.
Our social democrats, had the incredible intelligence to pass it into the constitution, requiring a 2/3 majority, when they were junior partner to the conservative (now reactionary) party. As with many things they passed back then, they claimed to have tummy aches, but to pass it because responsibility or whatever.
This is entirely self made by the now government leading social democrats, who are more of a conservative party and recently tried to jump on the right-populism train. Because that worked soooo well before...
But only a minority of the parliament doesn't like it, that's the problem. You need 2/3 of the Bundestag, but even our current governing coalition is composed of parties that are in favour of this strict austerity/debt limit (FDP) or are ambiguous or just slightly against it (SPD)
The 60 billion problem could snowball to a 260 billion problem, if more "Sondervermögen" are deemed unconstitutional.
Because it isn't anything new.