Austerity is always unpopular and is mainly directed at meeting arbitrary deficit rules that have little practical relevance. The cost is a weakened economy, people getting poorer, public infrastructure falling apart, climate goals being missed, and more. All just because beaurocrats are afraid of leaving too much debt to our children. Yeah maybe, but is that worth making everything worse?

This prejudice is no longer valid. Chinese OEMs have been getting really good at making cars. I would recommend doing some test drives and trying to be open and unbiased about it

And those are just the party coalitions, where the different national parties that are sent from all 27 countries form groups based on common agendas

Yes I agree. I went to some Diem25 events a couple of years ago (before all the recent crises) and their program for Europe did seem interesting. But this is just stupid, thanks for showing me why I shouldn’t vote for you

I just don’t understand why not all countries are investing heavily in schools and education. Today’s kids are the future tax payers and citizens. It should be one of the most important things to invest in and yet, school buildings are falling apart, text books are either worn and outdated or massively overprized, teachers are overworked, underpaid and disrespected, staff is never enough, digitalization is nothing more than a hopeful wish because there simply is no funding to implement it, buy the hardware or hire IT experts to introduce and maintain it

What about the race against time regarding climate change?

How could a government allow people to kill someone. No matter how you feel about migration and trespassing and all that. That is just insane

They had to do it this way in order to comply with EU law

Title is misleading. Officially it’s not possible to “buy” weed, you only get it from your social club “for free” with a monthly membership fee. Clever way to get around the “buying” aspect

And possibly the cost as well

And then they are surprised that people don’t trust the government anymore and the fascists gain so much popular support. If you are too much stuck in your ideological corridor where austerity is the holy grail of politics and spending money is evil, and on top of that you are constantly fighting with your coalition partners and get nothing done that way, instead of helping your country out of this economic crisis, this is what you get

Of course not

I didn’t say that people “just decided” to be nazis and I still wouldn’t say that. A major factor is economic inequality (but surely not the only one). The narrative of having to pay back more and more so the budget gets cut more and more is misleading. Debt doesn’t work the same way for governments as for a private entity. Paying back interests is easy if the economy is thriving. You can just pay back the old loans with new ones, this is absolutely no problem and governments have been doing this for ages. Absolute debt numbers in € don’t mean anything, and debt relative to GDP or federal budget also doesn’t say whether the debt can be paid back. We are afraid of possibly/maybe/probably not/whoknows may be in the future and cut spending everywhere. And then we are surprised that people vote for alternative parties

The Supreme Court didn’t say wr can’t spend more money, they just said the practice of shifting things around arbitrarily within the budget was illegal. So the government can still get the money they need, they just have to justify it correctly and use appropriate legal mechanisms. In fact, the same court also ruled that the government has to do more to fight climate change

Well, instead of symbolically joining a public protest, maybe Scholz could actually act against the rise of the extreme right, you know, like, not letting people alone with inflation and rising cost of living, or not letting our public infrastructure decay after years of neglect. All just because we are afraid of deficit spending and public debt, to the point where the government is unable to do anything anymore

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

Yea the article does seem to make it a bigger thing than it actually is. But, the fact that the management or at least the CEO (that also has a major saying in everyday business and is highly respected/feared) openly shows a disrespect for safety measures and laughs them off as annoying, definitely paints a picture. Sure, accidents happen and maybe the numbers aren’t excessively high, but if management doesn’t take them seriously and learn from them and take measures to reduce the risk, then this becomes really concerning

This shows that he not only is willing to risk his employees safety for the sake of a “greater good” or at least a profitable business. But the fact that he not only ignores safety practices but actively removes those that are already in place just because they don’t please him aesthetically and he doesn’t want to see them is a whole other level of egoism and carelessness. He really doesn’t give a damn about other people