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