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The German chancellor has called for a welfare reform, putting him on course for a possible clash with the SPD.

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[–] Evono@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

it could easily , just slim down the government , remove tax waste and more. a city near me just bought 32 benches at the cost of 70k€ EACH yes 70.000 why ? end of quarter they didnt want to get budget cuts the next quarter. some citizens found very similiar benches from another company ( like minimal different same material ) for 3,5k EACH 3500 each or many of the million graves of taxes , we have in my city multiple "Autobahn" which arent used but were built and need maintenance why ?

Our Government makes home owners pay for street repairs in full and more , where does our tax money go?

[–] null@piefed.au 14 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

where does our tax money go?

This is a pretty easy question to answer given that you're talking about a public institution.

The only difficulty is that the answer is complex and requires reading and understanding many sets of financial reports and accompanying minutes et cetera.

a city near me just bought 32 benches at the cost of 70k€ EACH

That's a pretty absurd claim, and simply not how budgets in public institutions work.

Sure there might have been some kind of fuckup so installation of one of 32 benches cost $70k, or any number of other plausible explanations, but large public institutions don't just throw $2.25m EUR at the end of a quarter as a budget stuffing exercise.

[–] Evono@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

While I couldn't find the article anymore ( it's a bit old ) I just found one for 12 for 170 thousand.

Another where they pay 20k for each because they are circular and more.

Tax waste is just all surrounding.

[–] null@piefed.au 1 points 2 hours ago

So you're just making things up based on the vibe.

[–] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 5 points 17 hours ago

just slim down the government

It's an easy thing to say, but even with the waste and bloat the government function itself is just a few percent of the expense. Pensions, health, education and child support are the vast majority of expenses. Remove the money from government, tack in on to pensions and you kicked the can down the road for another few years. After that the pension and health costs increases and eats up the extra money due to ageing of the population. Now you're back at square 1 but with a lot less people in government to keep things together.

You can't use immigrants to work jobs and pay taxes. It was tried, got a bunch of backlash in the end and by now the right has their campaigns ready to go all out if somebody suggests this. Birth rate is going down so it'll be rising costs of ageing and no new incomes from new workers. They're f-ed and know it. We all knew this moment would come, but if somebody suggested saving now for later they got voted out of office so nothing got done.