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Comment by dinfinity | Hacker News Reader

That was not the question. You have not tried, clearly. This is about gaining insight into what parts of your tax contribution pay for what exactly.

> I am more than happy to pay the taxes and my share for the society, but only if it’s used for the good used and to make my living standards better.

So what's the solution to improving your experience, pay less in taxes or more? Don't add conditions. Remember that this is the subject: "So we get to work for the state about half the time (including VAT etc)".

Sidenote, as to your experience: most of that is not due to the German government, but to wars started by Russia and the US/Israel, and indeed other global crises. They have influence over how to act on crises, but they can't (for instance) magically make natural gas/oil appear out of thin air. The easy proof for this is that many, many, many countries with very different governments face those same issues.

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The German government is responsible for making itself and its citizens wellbeing dependent on cheap natural gas/oil. It was German politicians that drove the classification of making natural gas "green" in EU, and it was their investments into fossil fuel infrastructure that enabled and encourage the industry to focus on products that utilized those cheap fossil fuels. They betted their economy on a world where cheap natural gas produced prosperity, and that bet fell apart when those wars started.

Germany is thus paying the price for those failed investments, as is any country which energy market is connected to the German market. It is natural for voters to look to the government for a solution for a problem that the government is responsible for.

If history had gone a different direction and kept natural gas prices low, the bet that the government did would had been successful and people would likely had a very different view of the government. People would had enjoyed one of the cheapest electricity prices of the world, burners would be cheaper than electric heaters, and the chemical industry would possible be the biggest in the world. Emissions would still be high but the bet was always to utilize natural gas until green hydrogen could replace it, even if that part of the bet had dubious scientific support).

I think the goal was at least in part explicitly to increase economic integration with newly democratic Russia in a(n apparently vain) attempt to prevent war.

The actions of Russia (and now the USA and Israel) really fucked a lot of countries all across the world; particular policies with regard to energy do have an effect, but are definitely not 100% the cause of the related issues.

I must underline, the winning wave of the rightwing peddle on increasing this dependency to cheap russian energy even more, while they're also criticizing Merkel and the others for building a dependency to cheap russian energy. Maybe I'm getting it wrong, but it's mind boggling.

That is part of the irony, but also the best explanation I got for why the election results are as they are. This is a political situation that the leading parties worked to create in the last few decades, and the dissatisfaction of the situation is one that feeds into populist movements.

CDU and the green could had done a 180 turn now when the bet on natural gas failed, and instead gone on a course for energy independence through a mix of nuclear, wind and solar, while investing heavily into making it as cheap as possible for the consumers. They would loose a lot of internal support, but it would demonstrate a clear alternative to the bet on natural gas.

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