Monday, September 16, 2019

Alice Weidel, September 11, 2019, 2020 Budget


Alice Weidel
2020 Budget
German Bundestag, September 11, 2019, Plenarprotokoll 19/111, pp. 13615-13618


[Alice Weidel is a chairman of the Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag delegation. She here responds to the German government’s 2020 general budget proposal. Soli refers to a tax paid over the past three decades to finance the unification of Germany. Hartz-IV is a public direct payments program for people of low income. Mario Draghi is the retiring director of the European Central Bank. Ludwig Erhard is a former German chancellor and finance minister.]


Right honorable Herr President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

Germany is on the brink of a recession; no simple, cyclical dip, but a powerful regression of economic performance. The exports are breaking down with two-figure losses in some of the important export countries: China, Great Britain, Russia. Especially affected: The automobile industry and machinery manufacturing, the backbone of our industrial production and thus our prosperity. There are endless reports of massive job eliminations at leading firms and in key sectors. Economic growth stagnates and the second quarter 2019 gross domestic product has even shrunk. We are thereby in comparison with the other EU and euro member states the taillight. The crisis is not coming. The crisis is already at hand.

The next recession will not be a fate fallen from heaven nor the work of wicked powers. It is primarily home-made. The difficulties into which the German economy and thus the entire country are sliding are the consequence of your disastrous and anti-economic politics

            Carsten Schneider (SPD – Erfurt): Because the exports recede? What 
            foolishness!

at the root of which is a green-socialist ideology which is ruining our country and is robbing it of future viability.

            Jan Korte (Linke): Yes, that was clever for once. Totally socialist!

This government bears the responsibility for the dis-assembly of the auto industry and for the planned economy of the electric auto. You are ruining our country with the absurd idea of being able to exit simultaneously from nuclear energy and coal-fired electricity and which at a fictitious date in the not too distant future – typical planned economy! – will make the country CO2  neutral.

            Britta Haßelmann (Grünen): Is it still looking good in Switzerland?

That must for once be made known. That is absolutely grotesque. That is an economic and scientific lunacy which now bestows on us the highest electricity costs in Europe, brings hundreds of thousands of low-income and middle-class households to a state of existential oppression, endangers the supply security and little by little drives from Germany energy intensive industries.

Your tendentious climate protection is nothing other than a monstrous program of de-industrialization combined with a veritable annihilation of the work place. You squander billions to avert in the distant future an imaginary end of the world. You allow yourselves to be lead about by dubious lobbyists like the Deutschen Umwelthilfe – in my opinion, this lobby organization ought to be banned – and thus destroy the basis of our prosperity and our ability to master the pressing challenges of the coming decades. I cite for example the unmastered consequences of unregulated migration into the social system and the criminal statistics.

Yes, I know already why you are squeaking so. The former Federal Intelligence chief, August Hanning, speaks of the more than 2 million overwhelmingly young men who have immigrated since 2015. And the next wave is at the door. The pictures from Lesbos are a Menetekal [shuffling of cards with always the same result]. The Turkey deal, to which you have so long and gladly clung, has failed. The Balkan route is open, and to that you simply close your eyes. We could end the migration across the Mediterranean if you were ready, with the Italian and other Mediterranean peoples, to take care that no more overseas illegals are able to reach Europe.

What however is done? You instead cheer on the humanitarian smugglers and human traffickers, also known as NGOs, allow their illegally smuggled passengers to continue to arrive in Germany and you even want to set up a state water taxi. That is really just grotesque, ladies and gentlemen. A real securing and control of the borders is possible. A single-digit figure of billions would be about the yearly cost – and you know that. No comparison with the lasting economic, political and before all social costs of a continued, unregulated immigration!

You want to restrict the individual movement of millions of citizens with bans, penalties and dirigiste measures, yet illegal immigrants can continue to move freely and unhindered across our borders. Even when the asylum deception evaporates and the right to remain is denied, they need not fear scarcely a single deportation. You have money left over for peripheral, particular interests but not for the effective control of our borders and the defense of our citizens who must turn over to you a record portion of their devalued incomes. You come up short on the return.

Meanwhile, every other Hartz-IV recipient has a migrant background: That comes to almost two-thirds of the so-called refugees living on Hartz-IV. Thus two-thirds of your skilled labor lives on Hartz-IV. Asylum migrants are besides disproportionately a burden in terms of criminality as measured by portion of the population. Serious sexual, robbery and homicide offenses by migrants have increased frighteningly.

            Achim Kessler (Linke): That is racial incitement!

The situation report on migrant criminality by the Federal Criminal Office confirms that in black and white. Stop with the rumpus here!

Britta Haßelmann (Grünen): Did you notice that no one was making noise? That started with the line, “Stop with the rumpus!” Nothing is too absurd for the speaking notes!

That the security of the citizen in public places goes more and more by the board evidently leaves you indifferent. One sees that here. An older mortgage is the failed euro experiment. Ten years of euro rescue by lost extensions of credit and push-button money printing are ten years of redistribution from bottom to top and from the citizen to the state. The zero-interest policy over which Olaf Scholz was so happy yesterday drives the German middle-class and saver into precariousness. The lyric of a wealthy country is long since out of tune. In Europe in regards wealth, the Germans hold down last place. The burst of the Draghi bubble will ignite the euro money socialism. That we know. The portion of bad credit on the balances of the southern European banks – the sums under fire – is gigantic. The zombie banks’ house of cards stands on the shaky ground of the European Central Bank’s negative interest policy which without restraint destroys the business model of the solid banks. We are on the verge of a gigantic banking crash, ladies and gentlemen.

We will experience the sustained development of a public debt and banking crisis, hyperinflation and finally a monetary reform in which the people will lose everything. And to this you have nothing to say. What are you doing to hinder this? Naturally nothing. On the contrary, you even accelerate [befeuern] the development. For that, you receive much applause and plenty of hugs from the European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde, from that woman who as International Monetary Fund director in 2010 declared, I quote:

            We must break the treaty so as to save the euro.

And that is exactly your understanding of respect for the law.

            Britta Haßelmann (Grünen): Don’t you come around here with respect 
            for the law!

For a solution other than one to German disadvantage you, however, presumably could assemble no majority. Since you have isolated Germany in Europe and no one takes you seriously anymore. At international conferences you sit on the sidelines while others pursue and enforce their own interests.

Carsten Schneider (SPD – Erfurt): When it comes to sitting on the sidelines, you are there!

You have disarranged the relation with the USA and driven the British out of the EU and, in the wake of the French, do nothing for a reasonable Brexit solution.

And now you lay before us a budget which before all permits acknowledgment of one thing: that you and your cabinet have not understood that the hour has struck. You consume the ever yet abundantly collected tax money as if the blessing would continue to flow eternally.

Britta Haßelmann (Grünen): What is really going on with the party funding?

Since what happens when the baby-boomers, who are now at the high point of the earnings years, in ten years go into retirement and can no longer be milked for account?

            Carsten Schneider (SPD – Erfurt): We are still waiting for your pension idea. 
Tell it for once!

Precaution for bad times is a term foreign to this budget. Notwithstanding the record size, the investment portion is ridiculously low, though nicely reckoned with an acrobatic skill. Moreover, the Finance Minister earns – which also is absolutely absurd – because investors are paying negative interest on long-term loans. That alone indicates the financial system is out of joint, right honorable ladies and gentlemen, since it is the citizens who by the surtax of negative interest are coldly and disgracefully expropriated. It is the money of the citizens, directly and indirectly collected, which you are squandering.

The economist Daniel Stelter estimates, I cite:

Just on the federal level in the last ten years, an additional 460 billion euros of available funds were frittered away.

End citation. There are sufficient construction projects in this country upon which the citizens’ money could have been better and more sensibly expended.

            Martin Schulz (SPD): Exactly! Swiss accounts!

The infrastructure decays, the streets degenerate, school buildings rot, the railroad runs ever worse, high-speed internet is elsewhere, of major projects like airports which will never be ready there is simply nothing to be said.

The social system is overburdened and not viable. Mass old-age poverty threatens Germany. Public order suffers, security is lost.

            Katrin Göring-Eckardt (Grünen): Yes, that’s why you live in Switzerland.

I know that this does not interest the Greens.

Britta Haßelmann (Grünen): You still live in Switzerland! Why exactly are you 
speaking here about our country?

The Bundeswehr is still scarcely serviceable, the working people are burdened with high taxes and duties.

            Britta Haßelmann (Grünen): You have decided to still live in Switzerland!

Instead of returning to the citizens the excessively gathered funds – you could not even abolish the Soli in a legal manner – your government and its supporting parties already incubate new taxes: CO2 tax, wealth tax, special duties on all possible things. Each pretext appears to justify to you to yet again burden the citizens because you are simply incapable of managing the  superfluously available tax money. That is after all the truth!

It simply cannot go on. A fundamental re-thinking is required: Environmental and resource management instead of climate defense, an end to the brainless energy transformation, a stop to uncontrolled immigration, a control of our borders,

            Michael Grosse-Brömer (CDU): You have emigrated to Switzerland!

a renunciation of the euro inflation policy and most of all, more freedom for the citizens and all in this country who create value.

Freedom of thought and speech instead of defaming those who think differently

            Katrin Göring-Eckardt (Grünen): Excuse me? You can say anything here.

            Britta Haßelmann (Grünen): And yet you are very big on that!

which poisons the poltical climate.

            Britta Haßelmann (Grünen): You are able to represent all that here!

Economic freedom instead of coddling and new prohibitions, tax and obligation relief instead of tax profiteering, bureaucracy and redistribution.

Listen to Ludwig Erhard – I cite:

State, trouble not thyself with my affairs but give to me so much freedom and leave to me so much of the proceeds of my labor that I may form my existence, my fate, and that of my family, myself.
           
            Martin Schulz (SPD): Most of all, things in Switzerland!

That is the politics of free citizens which our country so urgently requires and which in this government no longer has a home nor a spokesman.

            Britta Haßelmann (Grünen): What is really going on with your contribution 
            fund?

I am grateful.




[Translated by Todd Martin]