Personnel changes in the Chancellery
What has it achieved? Have policies remained the same? Will the red-green coalition continue to govern?
In any case, nothing has changed substantially, except that the state's borrowing flexibility has been enormously restricted.
The billion-dollar arms buildup costs so much money that little is left over for the important, peaceful state tasks:
- The German Federal Railway is sinking into increasing chaos. There aren't even enough funds for a complete renovation.
- The pension amount should not be adjusted to the level of inflation.
- The retirement age should be delayed or early retirement should be made more difficult.
- As with the traffic light coalition, social housing construction is falling far short of its promises. At the same time, immigration is creating millions of new housing needs.
- The costs and contributions for health and unemployment insurance are constantly rising. Many services that are actually government responsibilities are being passed on to insurance contributors. The provision of medication and medical care in Germany and neighboring EU countries has been "socialized," meaning that residents of neighboring countries regularly travel to Germany to obtain medication, in accordance with EU law.
- The costs of caring for the elderly are kept so low that even female caregivers have to be recruited in Afghanistan, Indonesia and Mexico.
- Municipal swimming pools have shorter opening hours or are being closed. The traffic light policy is also being enforced for school renovations. The meager government funding leaves no other option.
Did the personnel change in the Chancellery achieve anything? Yes, the arms industry is triumphant, and Germany's creditworthiness is sinking to the level of France and Greece.
Macron is trying to distract from his weak position by making platitudes, and Starmer is far behind Farage in the opinion polls, so his replacement seems only a matter of time.
If the AfD now strengthens Merz's weak position by joining forces, its upward trend will be over.
We've heard nothing more about the AfD's arms plans. At least they've committed to diplomacy and not a campaign against Russia. They also want to resume importing Russian gas and pay for it at world market prices, instead of imposing ridiculous sanctions on Russia.
Only Merz's inner circle considers it sensible to use military means to blackmail Russia into paying low natural gas prices, because it is clear that only the American superpower with a strong president can afford this, but three weak European heads of government cannot.
It's unknown whether the AfD isn't also indebting Germany on the capital market to show off its tanks and fighter jets. The party leadership is keeping quiet. Are they afraid that the state media will brand them traitors to their country if they try to stop this ludicrous arms buildup?
But since the coronavirus crisis, we've had to expect the most ludicrous campaigns. And we can all expect the government to lash out when the miserable social situation becomes more apparent in the fall.
"Every day, a new proposal for the overhaul of social security. The idea of SPD would-be economist Marcel Fratzscher is particularly popular at the moment: rich pensioners should be fleeced and, incidentally, forced into the armed forces or to serve in social institutions. It's time to remind ourselves of a few basic principles. Whether you listen to Bärbel Bas, the Minister of Social Affairs, or Friedrich Merz, both speak very freely and cluelessly about this topic. "We're living beyond our means," booms Friedrich Merz. Neither of them has a clue. And both freely distribute the insured's money, which doesn't belong to them.
1. Who is living beyond whose means?
Every employee who looks at their payslip at the end of the month is shocked by the deductions for insurance contributions. Many accept them, assuming they'll be protected in old age or in the event of illness. Doing the math is difficult, especially since half of the total contributions are deducted by the employer, thus hidden from the insured.
Simply double the sum of the deductions – and you've arrived at the true costs and contributions. Because one thing is clear: For employers, social security contributions are simply part of the labor costs. Whether these are paid to the employee or to the state makes no difference to the employer's calculations. That's why labor is so expensive in Germany – and all the gross-net calculations you find are exaggerated. The employer's share has to be added to the gross amount. Which makes what remains net all the more pitiful. And if you do this calculation, you arrive at a highly thought-provoking result.
Anyone who wants to receive a €2.000,00 pension in the future, or already receives one, will have paid approximately €450.000,00 in contributions in the form of employee and employer contributions, based on today's calculations. Just imagine: If you had financed a house 40 years ago WITHOUT pension deductions, it would have been paid off long ago, you would have saved on rent since then, and, given the real estate price increases of the past decades, you would be a real estate millionaire in any halfway decent metropolitan area. But we aren't. We're poor souls, because a €2.000 pension is really the lower limit.
This mechanism also explains why, in all wealth comparisons with Italy, France, or even Greece, Germans appear as poor wrecks. After deducting social security contributions, there's hardly anything left for wealth accumulation, and if it does occur, taxes are added on top.
It is not we who are living beyond our means – the state is living beyond our means.
Now the contribution assessment ceilings are being raised again – this represents a contribution increase for higher earners. The disparity between contributions and benefits is widening further.
2. Who owns the pension?
It's astonishing how recklessly politicians juggle pension policy, as if pensions were an act of grace. We're supposed to say thank you for every pension increase and patiently accept the cuts of recent years. This doesn't just apply to today's pensioners. Today's contributors must also know: They pay in – and will get less out, because every pension cut also reduces their entitlement.
The pension fund doesn't belong to the federal government, politicians, or political parties—it belongs to the contributors, and only to them. This also applies to health insurance. There's a particular problem here: immigration and the citizen's income. Refugees and recipients of the citizen's income claim health insurance benefits. However, the state only reimburses the insurance funds a fraction of the actual costs.
As early as 2022, the shortfall in the citizen's income was over nine billion and is likely to have grown to well over ten billion since then. The situation is similar with refugees – here, too, ten billion are at stake. This means that the insured are not insured persons – they are simply taxpayers. Their contributions are not used to cover the risk and consequences of illness, but rather to secretly finance the citizen's income and immigration. This mechanism is familiar from pension insurance.
The state is generous with benefits for this and that – at the expense of the contributors. According to estimates, the actual uncovered portion amounts to between 30 and 40 billion euros annually, which must therefore be borne by the contributors themselves, even though they are purely government responsibilities. This means that employees and employers are doubly burdened by their pension contributions: They not only finance their own retirement provisions, but also non-insurance-related tasks that should be paid for through taxes (i.e., from the federal budget). Today, "top politicians" quite brazenly talk about social security as if it were their money. It is the contributions of the insured that are being squandered, dissipated, wasted, and misused.
3. Why are the contributions so high?
For example, after reunification, GDR pensioners were financed by West German contributors. This was done through a pay-as-you-go system, by West German contributors, not West German civil servants and West German taxpayers – even though it would undoubtedly be the responsibility of all taxpayers (even civil servants) to shoulder the costs of reunification together. This leads to higher contribution rates than they would have been without these burdens – and at the same time, pension entitlements are reduced because not every euro paid in is used for pension benefits. Pension and health insurance contributions are therefore largely taxes that disappear somewhere in the government quagmire and are not used for the benefit of the contributors.
https://www.tichyseinblick.de/tichys-einblick/die-renten-diebe-sind-unter-uns/
"Klingbeil emphasizes: No previous coalition in German history has faced a €30 billion deficit. That's why the Vice Chancellor has begun work on the next budget months earlier than usual. This "game changer" is proving to be an accelerator of the inferno. The gaps in social budgets will grow dramatically in the coming months and years.
The ensuing tax hike orgy has already been prepared in the media, and the public has more or less been conditioned. The government's share of GDP, currently at 50 percent, will reach French levels of 57 percent or more in the coming years.
The federal budget isn't a game changer—it's an accelerant. If the bond market forces brutal consolidation in the coming years due to exploding yields, Chancellor Merz will go down in history as the first post-war leader to plunge the country into a "debt spiral." The "saviors" are already at the ready: the ECB, the EU Commission, and perhaps also the IMF and the World Bank.
https://tkp.at/2025/09/08/das-deutsche-kriegsbudget-und-die-schuldenspirale/
"When wearing masks became mandatory in April 2020, the state of science, which the political actors at the time still claimed to follow, was already such that it was clear: there is no benefit whatsoever from wearing masks; on the contrary, fabric and medical masks ensure that the spread of viruses and thus SARS-CoV-2 is intensified.
When FFP2 masks were made mandatory, it was already known that the permanent wearing of these masks would result in health damage and that wearing them would NOT reduce the virus in any way, neither in terms of spread nor in terms of infection and transmission.
It was also known that FFP2 masks, like all other masks, serve as breeding grounds for all kinds of bacteria and fungi, all of which have the potential to make people sick.
So why did political actors like Spahn make wearing masks mandatory when it has no effect on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and offers no protection against infection with or transmission of SARS-CoV-2? Why did these same political actors accept the risk of exposing billions of people to increased health risks, even though their goal was supposedly "protecting the population"?
https://sciencefiles.org/2025/09/09/spahn-in-angst-war-es-das-ziel-der-maskenpflicht-so-viele-menschen-wie-nur-moeglich-zu-infizieren-studie/
“The results show the following:
-Vaccinated children were more than four times more likely to develop asthma than unvaccinated children.
-They were also six times more likely to have acute and chronic ear infections.
-Speech disorders occurred 4,47 times more frequently in the vaccinated group than in the unvaccinated group.
-In the unvaccinated cohort, however, there were no cases of brain dysfunction, diabetes, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, tics, or other mental disorders."
https://tkp.at/2025/09/10/geimpfte-kinder-sind-wesentlich-oefter-krank-als-ungeimpfte-studien/
"The figures show that energy products from the East are indispensable for Europe, whether we like it or not. And to summarize briefly: The sanctions against Russia have not changed its sales, but ours, as well as our lifestyle, and have placed us in a situation fraught with enormous disadvantages and difficulties.
The new threats of economic restrictions against Russia are not only a "dangerous" and counterproductive measure, but also reveal the profound inconsistency that characterizes the West as a whole. In short, it is the wrong path. The rhetoric of direct warfare, even through tariffs and rapid market manipulation, is beneficial to no one.
What we need is diplomacy and negotiations to address and resolve the real causes of the conflict, not unrealistic ultimatums premised on the idea of an unconditional ceasefire that ignores the deep-rooted reasons that motivated Russia in the first place. The West is now demanding an unconditional ceasefire; Russia will not accept this, and even a new package of US sanctions will not force it to do so.
https://tkp.at/2025/09/16/gasleitungsdiplomatie-auf-kosten-europas/
"The subjects in which students perform worst, as shown by the new IQS education trend—chemistry, physics, mathematics, and biology—are the same subjects that female teacher trainees least often choose to teach, and the subjects they least often study. The likelihood that teachers in predominantly female teaching staff will be assigned to subjects outside their field because there are not enough teachers who have studied mathematics, chemistry, physics, and natural sciences is very high; the likelihood that the existing gaps will have to be filled with teachers brought in on an hourly basis who have neither the motivation nor the time to teach their subject properly is very high.
The educational catastrophe is home-made, a feminization catastrophe – but of course, that's not what we're allowed to say, because the sexism-sayers are just waiting to remove existing problems from public discourse and thus prevent the solution by attacking the bearers of bad news...
https://sciencefiles.org/2025/10/16/bildungskatastrophe-der-elefant-im-klassenzimmer-den-sich-niemand-zu-benennen-wagt/