The first impression is manic, like the manic phase of bipolar disorder, when the affected person is unjustifiably optimistic and hyperactive without any foundation in reality – only to fall into the depressive phase afterwards. Reality is such a thing. When reading the entire paper, there are short sections that seem normal and one takes note of them in surprise. The section on disability policy, for example, seems at least on the surface (I haven’t worked through it more closely yet) like what one would expect from experts in the past. Achievable progress. Still no guarantee that what is promised will also be implemented, but it at least does not immediately collide with the real world and does not cause direct pain.
Then there are areas where an abyss yawns. In the section on work and social policy, for example. It is almost entirely made up of bad premonitions, already at first glance. With this sentence, for example: “This also includes better aligning the benefit clawback rates in the different benefit systems.” Does that mean that the sanction system, which turns the citizen’s allowance back into the familiar Hartz IV, should be extended to other social benefits such as rent benefits? So to speak, sanctions for everyone who is not rich enough?
Of course, such agreements are necessarily vague at many points, after all, they are supposed to leave room for implementation. But there is plenty of will, strength and support, as the word cloud gives away, but what is left of it when taking the actual results of the present as a starting point? A unified digital administration, in which data for each social benefit must be submitted only once and preferably without appearing in the authority?
First of all, it occurs to me that only parts of this area are handled by federal authorities, municipal administrations handle rent benefits, for example. This is no small problem – in the coalition agreement, it is claimed that the federal government will only set requirements for municipalities that are also co-financed, but only a hundred billion out of the trillion-dollar package is provided for municipalities, which account for two-thirds of public investments.
And the equipment of municipalities is, when it comes to digitalization, anything but uniform, not even within larger municipalities themselves. At least uniform software is required for a unified processing, which must also run on different platforms and must guarantee a uniform security standard under all these conditions. Such a thing is extremely expensive and time-consuming (and at the end often not functional anyway). There is exactly one way that would create the prerequisites relatively quickly – the federal government provides uniform computers with the corresponding system for all affected areas, to all affected administrative units. But this would be such a gigantic order that one doesn’t even want to know who would grease whom with what ..
Why do I now think of the municipal tax? Oh yes, because – and this is an example of the other side of digitalization – Microsoft fought for years against the use of Linux in the Munich city administration and ultimately won this by the fact that the Germany branch with the corresponding municipal tax moved to Munich (and that the corporate tax should partly replace the municipal tax according to the coalition agreement, hits the municipal budget, only as a side note).
However, all this played out years ago, when knowledge about the fundamental vulnerability of US-American IT products was still relatively exotic. The knowledge is now present, but the US-American nose, which always sticks deep into the data with corresponding hardware and software, is still often overlooked, only the threat from China is perceived. The coalition agreement is in this respect naive. It talks about data security, but a realization in which this would actually be given is not even remotely imaginable. This is already shown by the blind endorsement of the digital patient file.
In general, the basic problem that digital data are inherently much easier to falsify than analog data, also retrospectively, has not yet been addressed. However, the implementation, as usual, will fail due to money as much as due to the inertia of different political levels and the damage could ultimately be limited quite unintentionally.
This is simply the thing with reality. Then the CDU has a hobby and writes a kind of savings contract as a contribution to the pension from birth, into which the thus favored ones can continue to contribute after reaching adulthood. Then one also thinks that it would be useful to read the Bundesbank statistics on wealth distribution.
These are quite sufficient to recognize that one part of the population does not need this at all because sufficient wealth is available and this paltry savings contract is only a kind of unnecessary bonus that others do not have either with 18 nor afterwards anything to save, which was already the case with the Riester pension. What remains under these conditions is that the wealthy can rejoice a little, but ultimately just another piece of state money is thrown into the financial market. And still under conditions where one can daily expect the loud popping of large bubbles.
Or then it is emphasized how important education is. Primary school children should not fail the “minimum standards in reading, writing, arithmetic” and no one should leave school without a diploma. The keyword “migration” and “language” does not really appear in this context, although this is where the big problem lies. Conveniently, education is a state affair, so one can easily make big speeches and then explain that one is actually not responsible.
But then the child and youth welfare is to be transferred from the responsibility of the administrations to the social courts in the future. For all those who have experience with legal disputes in the social area, a very bad sign. For the affected people in particular, because social courts are generally much less friendly than