The EU does a Greece on Germany, illustrating neatly that, whoever the real enemy at the heart of the EU is, it isn’t the Germans. Austerity, or rather the German version, has left much of Germany, unable to create and supply its own currency as it relies instead on the Euro, in many ways now in a similar state to the one Britain’s reduced to after Austerity. It’s worth remembering we didn’t need to get our money rationed by the ECB as Germany has, our politicians did that all by themselves, leading Economania to ponder again on who exactly might be the real enemy here. “Thousands of bridges need repairing or even replacing, roads are riddled with potholes, plaster is crumbling from the walls of schools, and there are concerns over an under-equipped military. Germany lags well behind much of the rest of the world on high-speed internet. Just 2% of households are supplied by fibre broadband, compared to 75% in Japan and South Korea, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. This is all despite an eye-watering record budget surplus for the first half of 2018 of €48bn.”
That budget surplus is the money which has been ‘saved’ by not spending it on obviously very necessary maintenance of essential infrastructure. It frankly baffles Economania why the Germans, not a people we easily associate with meek acceptance of adverse circumstance, are putting up with this nonsense. However: “According to fiscal observers Germany has been too fixated on the so called schwarze null or “black zero” – the sacred national obsession with balancing the budget.” Does this explain it? We think they badly need an education if it does… We understand from economist Bill Mitchell the German infrastructure has been deliberately run down with a view to presenting to the German people the idea that, as the country has no money, they’ll have to borrow the money from corporations to get the country working again, at a suitable rate of interest, of course. Like PFI then. This will leave the Germans, who appear completely in the dark about this, effectively working to pay tax to their neofeudal corporate overlords.
While we are aware it would be a dangerous, perhaps suicidal folly, quite apart from in practical terms impossible, simply to walk away from it, it’s clear that unless significant changes are made in the near future, inside the EU isn’t somewhere any sane nation would want to be. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/20/trains-on-time-germans-deutsche-bahn-railway