German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/28, pp.
2421-2422.
Many thanks, Frau President. Right honorable ladies and
gentlemen.
I dedicate my first speech in the German Bundestag to all
working citizens in Germany.
I speak of people who get up in the morning every day and go
to work to feed their families, and at the end of the month if they are lucky
with great difficulty read a zero in their account statement.
The basis of livelihood of millions of these people has been
brought into question on account of the lockdown and Corona compulsory
preventive measures. This everyone knows who is personally acquainted with
normal people, and not only by looking through the darkened glass of a government
car. Who yesterday was working full-time could, thanks to Corona, in the
morning be on part-time employment. While this sovereign house for some hours
conducted a silly debate on the vaccination obligation, over half a million
people are now in a state of part-time work. These, ladies and gentlemen, are
the unsozial priorities of this
government.
Still more unsozial
is the tax policy which asks our citizens trapped in part-time work to pay
cash. In Germany, there is the so-called progression reservation. This is
concerned that, for figuring the tax burden, the actually tax-free part-time
work money will be taken into account. That means in clear text: They have on
the whole less money, because the part-time employment money will only
partially compensate the loss of earnings, yet at the same time the part-time
employment money increases their tax burden. It happens that any who want to
work yet are not allowed to work will now subsequently pay as per Herr Lindner’s
tax ruling. This indeed must be that liberal tax policy which the FDP has ever
promised us.
And now it happens that the Linke party comes creeping out
of its under 5 percent corner and wants tax relief for the part-time workers.
Valued colleagues of the Linke, I rejoice that the comrades meanwhile find some
time between Antifa demonstrations, gender fuss and hatred of Germany to simulate
sozial policy for one’s own people.
Carina Konrad (FDP): Alter Schwede!
Yet here even Erich Honecker is more believable than you.
Since the AfD already two years ago made this proposal for the relief of the
part-time workers. Look it up in the publications. What you have proposed after
a two year delay was a long time ago in a much larger package demanded by us
for the entire working population. Yet it is ever so in socialism: Justice
ultimately becomes a matter of indifference if one has the wrong party book.
You then rejected our motion for the relief of part-time workers, and now you
put forward this cheap plagiarism.
We take this as an incentive – as an incentive to continue to fight for a relief of all working Germans, as an incentive that one can be sozial without thereby becoming red.
[trans: tem]
