| The German government is going to sell off the “family silver” The Federal Government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder discussed the final version of the draft budget for 2005 at its meeting yesterday in Berlin. The main news was the news that the federal center had decided to sell off in the next two years the entire balance of what they say here is “family silver.” We are talking about stakes in two, to use Russian terminology, natural monopolies - the telecommunications concern Deutsche Telekom and the postal concern Deutsche Post. The German state, having got rid of 16.7% of telecom and over 40% of postal shares last year, still owns 26% and 20% of the shares of both concerns, respectively. Finance Minister Hans Eichel, who hopes to earn 15.45 billion euros from these assets for the state budget, does not hide the fact that he was pushed to take such a difficult step not only by extremely constrained material, but also by political circumstances.
Just two years ago, Minister Eichel, initially known as a financial stingy in the Schröder government, had to say goodbye to perhaps the main dream of his professional life. For more than three decades, Germany has essentially been living in debt - budget expenditures exceed revenues from year to year, and the “debt spiral” is increasingly putting pressure on the most vulnerable public sphere in such situations - social policy. Having arrived in the “red-green” government, Minister Eichel first set about cutting budget expenditures. One of the first to resist Eichel’s starvation rations was the Federal Chancellor himself, who uttered the phrase that became popular two years ago: “Enough is enough for you, Hans!” Thus, Gerhard Schröder forbade his finance minister to save on anything and everything.
It was by 2006 that Hans Eichel promised the Germans a deficit-free state budget. However, very soon adjustments had to be made. Now, every year until 2008, the German federal government's debts will reach approximately 20 billion euros. And the bad thing about budget debts in Germany is that in the future there is expected to be less and less of the working-age population, but more and more pensioners. And today no one knows how the growing German youth should pay at least the interest accruing on loans received by the budget. Today no one knows how to repay these loans themselves.
Experts are increasingly talking about the financial bankruptcy of JSC Germany, in whose state treasury there is a shortfall of 40 billion euros year after year. However, the federal government is firmly locked in the grip of German Basic Law and the European Euro Stability Pact. The first document prohibits the excess of budget debt over public investment, and the second prohibits the budget deficit from exceeding the level of 3% of GDP. Balancing the budget in the current conditions is possible either by increasing state revenues, and this can be achieved mainly by increasing the already high level of taxes in Germany, or by reducing all kinds of government subsidies. In both cases, these “operations” will be painful for the entire German society, which is not easy to come to terms with the fact that the pieces of Germany’s budget “pie” that it gets are melting before our eyes.
Until the end of 2006, the federal budget will be kept afloat with the help of multibillion-dollar revenues from the sale of “family silver.” Then “small things” will go under the hammer: government officials are already talking about selling state shares of Frankfurt and Munich airports. But in this case, it will be possible to gain, at best, a billion euros.
When this happens, the government of Chancellor Schröder will be able to safely empty the pockets of its budget, which will no longer have anything to mend. True, it is possible that by that time the “red-greens” in Germany will again be replaced by a conservative government of Christian Democrats. The “blacks,” as this party is also called, will have no choice but to begin to blame this “borrowed life” on their political predecessors. As a matter of fact, the Schröder government did exactly the same thing at first. The Social Democrats and the “greens” then blamed all the sins on the too long “Kohl era.” Yuri Shpakov, Berlin |
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