Clever Move

To let German service members ride their country’s trains for free.

Train

None of the Bundeswehr’s transportation systems work so this way they’ll still be able to make it to combat operations on time. Although, on the other hand, Germany’s railway isn’t the most reliable these days either.

German service members in uniform and their children will be allowed to travel for free on trains in Germany, beginning next month. Germany’s minister of defense and the head of Deutsche Bahn came to an agreement Monday in Berlin, allowing military members from each branch to ride all of the national railroad service’s trains at no cost, together with their children up to the age of 14. Spouses will still have to pay their own way, a German Defense Ministry spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Tax Us More?

Don’t ask. It’s a German thing.

Taxes

Germans Agree CO2 Taxes Aren’t High Enough and Want to Pay More – Germans say they’re ready pay a higher national levy on carbon pollution after utilities and policy makers joined climate activists in rebelling against proposed below-market rates deemed insufficient to fight climate change…

Merkel said the levy was the “centerpiece” of her government’s move to get Germany back on track to cut emissions.

Now if we could only get Merkel & Co. to cut their emissions. German oddity 10: Germans have more words for taxation than Eskimos have for snow.

Jesus Just Left Chicago

Madrid, actually. But once she got to Germany nobody offered her a place to sit.

Greta

Nobody needed to. She also had a first class ticket. But that’s beside the point or something. I just don’t get it. Doesn’t Greta HERSELF have her own special train or, you know, mobile field headquarters or something along those lines?

Climate activist Greta Thunberg and Germany’s national railway company created a tweetstorm Sunday after she posted a photo of herself sitting on the floor of a train surrounded by lots of bags.

The image has drawn plenty of comment online about the performance of German railways.

Wir wünschen #Greta eine gute Heimfahrt. Und arbeiten weiter hart an mehr Zügen, Verbindungen und Sitzplätzen.

German Of The Day: Fachkräftemangel

That means a shortage of skilled specialists.

Skills

And Angela Merkel HERSELF has warned Germans of a possible exodus of businesses from Germany if nothing is done about this acute problem.

Doesn’t really make sense, though. She brought around two million skilled specialists into the country not all too long ago, or at least that’s how the German media and others painted it. And some 200,000 skilled specialists keep pouring into Germany each and every year. Surely there must be some misunderstanding here somewhere, some disconnect.

Weil kein qualifiziertes Personal gefunden wird, bleiben viele Stellen in deutschen Betrieben unbesetzt. Die Kanzlerin fordert eine Lösung für den Fachkräftemangel. Ansonsten drohten drastische Folgen.

German Of The Day: Transaktionssteuer

That means financial transactions tax.

Tax

And that means, as usual, taxing the little guy tying to get ahead while letting the big time speculators off the hook. All in the name of Social Justice. Or Social Democracy (SPD), if you prefer.

Germany Pushes Forward on European Financial Transactions Tax – Under a new blueprint for the tax, sent by Germany Finance Minister Olaf Scholz to the other governments on Monday and seen by The Wall Street Journal, anyone buying shares in large companies domiciled in those countries and with a market value of over €1 billion ($1.1 billion) will have to pay a minimum 0.2% tax over the transaction value…

Germany is under some time pressure to deliver an agreement since the government has already earmarked the expected proceeds to pay for higher state pensions for the poor starting in 2021. It expects revenues of about €1.5 billion a year from the tax.

Germans have more words for taxation than Eskimos have for snow.

The Rents Won’t Be the Only Things That Will Freeze

Building will come to a complete standstill in Berlin too.

Berlin

But Berlin’s red-redder-green politicians (SPD, the Left Party, the Greens) don’t know anything about building (look at the state the city of Berlin is in). They can only tear things down. Oh, yes. And redistribute. They will redistribute for as long as it takes to get anybody who’s got anything to get out of town.

Berlin Builders Hit the Streets in Backlash Over Rent Freeze – The German capital’s government is trying to ease the burden on tenants after a property boom caused rents to double over the past decade. However, critics of the plan — including economists and large landlords — have said the only way to address growing demand for housing is to build more homes.

The rent-freeze legislation will start its passage through Berlin’s parliament this week and is expected to come into force in the first quarter of next year…

The city’s plans “threaten to cause considerable damage to both the housing market and Berlin as a whole,” IW institute economists wrote in a recent report for the Christian Democratic Union party, which is in opposition in Berlin and opposes the measures. Scrapping the plan is “urgently needed from an economic perspective to prevent wider damage to the Berlin economy,” they added.

The Scandal Nobody Wants To Talk About

Because it reveals the Media Brain Police for who they are.

Relotius

Granted, this guy was a real artist but can you imagine the armies of lesser charlatans out there who furnish us with our news each and every day? No media bias or fake news here, right?

The furore surrounding Der Spiegel journalist Claas Relotius is back, with a book by the colleague who exposed him –

Fiction and non-fiction can feed off each other in unusual ways. In the winter of 2018, Germany was shaken by the biggest media scandal since the forged Hitler diaries, after it emerged that the country’s bastion of investigative journalism – DER SPIEGEL – had published stories by a reporter who had “fictionalised” his prize-winning articles with armies of invented characters. Now the “Relotius scandal” has gone into its second round, with the publication of a non-fiction book by the journalist who exposed his fraudulent colleague: a detective story about the search for truth in the era of fake news that makes a more gripping read than most novelists could have managed…

Before he was exposed, he had won the top prize for German reporters, the Reporterpreis, four times in six years. One judge praised his stories as jumping off the page “almost like literature”. He was in line for a promotion at Der Spiegel.

More Down, Down, Down, Down, Down

Just when you thought Germany’s SPD couldn’t sink any further…

SPD

The Genossen (comrades) figure out a way to do it. I never really believed that the Volkspartei (people’s party with a broad base) SPD could ever actually disappear into the sunset forever but now I’m just not so sure anymore.

Germany’s SPD slip in polls after choosing new leftist leaders – Support for Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD) has fallen after members last week chose as leaders a leftist duo who are skeptical about remaining in government with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, a poll showed on Saturday.

A Forsa poll put the SPD on 11%, 3 points down from a week ago and hitting a low last seen in June after previous leader Andrea Nahles quit due following the party’s worst-ever result in elections to the European Parliament.

You know the lyrics, folks. I’m going down. Down, down, down, down, down.

 

German Of The Day: Abschwung

That means downturn.

Downturn

German industry hit by biggest downturn since 2009 – Output falls 5.3% in year to October, weighing on eurozone growth outlook.

Germany’s sprawling industrial sector is suffering its steepest downturn for a decade, underlining how the engine of the eurozone’s biggest economy is sputtering.

In der deutschen Industrie geht der Abschwung mit einem schwachen Start ins vierte Quartal weiter. Im Oktober haben die Betriebe ihre Gesamtproduktion erneut deutlich zurückgefahren.