Comment by malthaus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by malthaus | Hacker News Reader

i'm swiss living in berlin currently (leaving soon)

germany is a country on the rapid decline. the recently decided investment effort and the new government are a step in the right direction but wont halt or revert that decline. the country needs a BIG shock and be rebuilt from the ground up. the new ministry is just pandering / virtue signalling and won't have any effect.

some examples:

1) legacy financial holes like the pension scheme, no bandaid will save this

2) public workers safety & pension "beamtentum" - wrong incentives, wrong people, wrong mindset

3) workers rights are too strong (betriebsrat, unflexible hiring & firing)

4) taxes are ridiculously high, there's zero incentive for global talent to come here

5) bureaucracy is absolutely insane, a country run by risk averse lawyers stuck in the 1980s

6) immigration was botched so bad, they wont recover from this for another generation

7) the rise of the far right afd was handled so terribly, the trauma from ww2 is still too big to deal with it rationally, rather than calling the strongest party in the country "antidemocratic" (which ironically IS antidemocratic in itself). if they dont get a grip on this, afd will lead the country in 4 years.

8) no common identity / goal except for wanting to show being the "good guys", see misincentived sustainability initiatives, handling of israel / palestina, etc

9) weak leaders / politicians. they are all bureaucrats

10) regulation first, innovation never. see AI

Most of the things you listed are not really much of a problem, or rather a symptom of something else. Also lots of populist bla bla, where I think you don't really know what you are talking about. Anyway... the real is issue is this:

Germany is being held hostage by pensioners.

Everything comes down to finances and finances comes down to pensions. It's more than 100 billion euro of tax money going to pensions (on top of high and increasing social-insurance contributions). Retired people are the majority of voters, you can't run on politics to their disadvantage. It's politics for old people, by old people. They indebted the state for their benefit when they were young, ignored the demographic crisis for decades, and now they won't forgo a dime for their children's future.

We will get civil war, before pensions are touched. Without that money, we debate scapegoats, instead of investing in existentially necessary reforms, building houses and fixing the infrastructure debt.

Berlin is not Germany.

I like to believe that 16 years of Merkel left people with the inability of understanding politics and democracy in general.

Handling AfD by inviting them to a talk show where the audience/presenters were mostly people with Greens/Left background is emblematic of how this country has been delegating the ability to think democratically to someone else. No wonder we have extreme parties on the rise. (Both Left and AfD are extremes, no matter what)

Instead of listening, they made fun or criticized a party of monkeys that should have never reached 22%. Because that's all they could do. Make fun, minimize, claiming you're racist, etc.

Burning Tesla factories, breaking their cars while they are parked, ... letting protesters glue themselves on the streets blocking you from reaching whichever place you planned to (be it an office or a hospital). This is daily life in Germany in the last 3-4 years. Wtf!

I am personally sad that all the good things will change because the last 20 years I think Germany really became a great country, unlike all the criticism that people like to throw at it. All just because people couldn't confront the facts. And yes, this means making hard decisions where needed.

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