Germany’s Days as an Industrial Superpower Are Coming to an End
Germany’s Days as an Industrial Superpower Are Coming to an End
As political paralysis grips Berlin, the energy crisis was the final blow for a growing number of manufacturers
The lack of investment in strategic infrastructure, the lack of public expenses, and the mostly monolithic neoliberal economic politics bring them to this situation.
At one point, you need to invest public money in the infrastructure that work for the day-to-day life of everyone. In this case, we speak about the railway network. Europe can't be car centric like the US. The geography and the urbanism of European towns and cities don't allow this perspective.
This has implication on the job market as poorer can't afford a job. The neoliberal politics targeting the social welfare make people poorer and this had influences on the consumption and the economy. It's of course more complicated than this. But, it gives an idea of the situation.
Rail is one thing but there are also others like bike and pedestrian infrastructure, education, internet, digital streamlined government processes. Also maintenance of infrastructure in general.
Rail and other transport decisions do highlight how a lot of the economic policies do not reflect what makes sense but what the existing industry wants to survive for a few more years without adapting.
Another issue is not only the establishment of better infrastructure, but also the maintenance of existing infrastructure.
The postal services are a great example of failed privatization.
In many areas letters now take weeks to arrive or dont arrive at all. Meanwhile many processes require written communication by law. My fathers business was regularly struggling with it. Think about it. You get your invoices late. Your invoices to customers are late. You receive letters from the tax office demanding a reply within two weeks, but they took three weeks to arrive. Each and every time you have to explain, that you couldn't act before, or you need to talk to your customers, why they didn't pay yet.
Germany is exceptional at creating itself so many inefficiencies that it is a cloes to a miracle when anything actually just works for a change.
And then they are surprised that people don't trust the government anymore and the fascists gain so much popular support. If you are too much stuck in your ideological corridor where austerity is the holy grail of politics and spending money is evil, and on top of that you are constantly fighting with your coalition partners and get nothing done that way, instead of helping your country out of this economic crisis, this is what you get
Nobody is surprised. The FDP knows exactly what they're doing, which is make as much politics blatantly in favour of their donors as long as they're in power. They don't care about what that does to the general populace or even how they're perceived for it. One or two elections later everyone will have basically forgotten about it again anyway and the whole shtick repeats.
This is what German people vote for. We didn't have 16 years of stagnation because Führer Merkel ruled unchecked, we had it because people voted for that shit. And the moment the current government started to pick up the speed a bit and actually pushed some reforms through, the population had a full blown meltdown.
We are talking about Germany here, not Italy. Oh wait...
Why invest in infrastructure when Germany and most of the EU has terminal demographics and poor energy policy? If anything they did the next generation a solid by not weighing them down with excessive infrastructure.