NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, in an interview with Bild am Sonntag, once again explained to the Germans just how much money they should be spending on tanks and similar things. The Dutchman resorts to the old cliché, used by Latin teachers in the early 20th century to promote the Wilhelminian Empire’s armaments projects, “Si vis pacem para bellum” – if you want peace, prepare for war. And Bild am Sonntag makes it into a headline right away.
And then it asks the next question:
“Herr Secretary General, will Russian be taught at our schools soon, if we don’t massively arm up?”
To which Rutte, humorlessly as he is, promptly replies: “We must prevent that! Simply by spending more money on armaments and producing more.” One can imagine that Rutte has had painful experiences with language lessons and indeed with English, if one ever hears him speak English, but arming up to avoid learning Russian is like bombing the Vatican to avoid learning Latin.
And then the demanded Dutchman demands from the Germans five percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) for armaments. What is really just translated into being of the utmost importance. The German federal budget still amounts to around ten percent of the GDP. Five percent of the GDP would be 50 percent of the budget, or half, or, measured against the 2024 federal budget, roughly 235 billion euros per year.
The expenditures for basic income, for instance, in 2024, were approximately 38 billion euros. The total expenditures of the budget item for labor and social affairs, in which the basic pension, housing allowance and a range of other federal benefits are included, amounted to 36.8 percent of the last federal budget, or 3.8 percent of the GDP, still less than what Rutte alone envisions for armaments.
This height has only been reached once in the history of the Federal Republic and that was in 1963, with 4.9 percent of the GDP. However, at that time the GDP was 195.5 billion and the federal budget was 59 billion, which was not ten percent, as it is today, but 30 percent of the GDP.