The passive voice in that statement is doing a LOT of heavy lifting there, Friedrich.

Its crazy to me that the only left leaning party in Germany was split by internal divisions between neoliberalism and progressive politics. How was that even possible when more than half of Germany's voters are left leaning?

Are you referring to SPD? They haven't bothered with actual left-leaning politics for a while. Die Linke is our party on the left, and they are experiencing a renaissance right, but unfortunately not nearly as much as the far right.

To answer your question: Most German voters are centrists with a mix of vaguely conservative and social democratic views. And they've been exposed to economic anxiety narratives and xenophobic fear-mongering for the past two decades, while lacking the political education to smell the populist bullshit for what it is in a social media environment defined by anti-intellectualism and fake news.

Merz can no longer be financed

I typically abhor violence but i understand if somebody would kill Merz due to him being a danger to the general population. A politician has to help the people, not hurt them. If he doesn't fulfill this one basic task, he's unfit to be a politician. He has to understand that or step back immediately. If he doesn't, he's unreasonable and cannot be talked to logically.

He's not "conservative", he isn't conserving anything. He isn't conserving the living standard of the people. He's just a dumbass posing as a conservative, while actually wreaking havoc on our collective future.

If they want us to have kids, they have to pay for them, of course.

IMO the borders need to be closed first before taxing the rich works well enough. Allow me to explain:

If you tax the rich today, they drop the german citizenship and become carribean citizens tomorrow, and then you can't tax them anymore. All the while they hold on to their companies in germany.

Instead, it has to be illegal to invest inside germany (above a certain threshold amount) if you don't have german citizenship. This way, the rich can't flee. They have to keep german citizenship to hold on to their companies, and then they can be taxed.

surprisingly good video.

yeah, exactly what i'm saying, real assets (houses, agricultural areas, factories) are local and cannot be moved to other places easily, so they can be taxed. tax the rich.

It's like telling people that jump from diet fad to diet fad all they need to do is count calories.

We all know the solution, none of these countries are doing it

The worry is:

• the german government prints 1bn euros and hands it out to the people
• the people will spend 300m of it to buy furniture, cars, smartphones
• that money goes to companies abroad, to billionaires abroad, and can't be "taxed back"

The solution is:

• literally create import tariffs that make importing goods from other countries more expensive, so people are incentivized to spend money on domestically produced goods
• now the money flows back to domestic billionaires,
• where it can be "taxed back"

the german industry produces more goods than it ever has in its entire history. that growth has slowed down to close to zero simply means that it's literally at its peak.

explain to me why there aren't enough resources to go around for everyone?

Although I appreciate the thought here, and I think the investment idea may even be good regardless of what I'm about to say, that's not exactly how this works. If you tax the assets the rich own, where they own them, it doesn't matter where they go. And they can't live in Germany and not get taxed, so they can change citizenship all they want if they live here they will get taxed here. And based off of the most recent studies/reports I've seen (but not read) rich don't actually move when taxes go up - which makes sense. People have lives, family, friends, favorite restaurants and hobby spaces.

The rich will try to dodge the taxes, they may even succeed but we don't have to legistate a bullet proof solution we just have to agree:

1. the rich need to be heavily taxed (I'd even say out of existence)
2. taxing the rich is possible via various methods
3. taxing the rich would solve and/or reverse most of societies problems so everyone should talk and support it.

But yes, I'm a big fan of no outside investment. I'm also a fan of government investment requiring ownership purchases. I'm also a fan of requiring companies to be partially or totally owned by their workers. And I don't think anyone should have a net worth over let's say 50 million.

So you're saying the assets (factory, houses, land) should be taxed directly, instead of the billionaires?

Interesting idea, i need to think about it.

Edit: after having thought about it, i'd like there to be a "exempt tax amount", i.e. if you own less than $10m, you don't pay any wealth taxes. if you do taxation solely on a per-asset basis, that'd be difficult. It would be better if the person gets taxed and not the asset itself. Sothat you can deduct a tax-exempt amount per person, not per asset.

Friedrich Merz is Germany's Kier Starmer and if you don't understand what i mean go check on UK and how well they are doing under Starmers government and you'll understand.

I mean if the billionaires own the houses and factories and land it's the same thing right?

After having thought about it, i’d like there to be a “exempt tax amount”, i.e. if you own less than $10m, you don’t pay any wealth taxes.

• if you do taxation solely on a per-asset basis, that’d be difficult.
• It would be better if the person gets taxed and not the asset itself. Sothat you can deduct a tax-exempt amount per person, not per asset.

does that make sense to you?

That makes sense. My point isn't to tax the property it's that the property is taxed, if that makes any sense. You tax based on the property, it traces to the owner, the owner gets taxed based on the property. If the owner lives in Beijing or Antarctica the property is still here and gets taxed, they can't avoid it by moving unless they can take the property.

So in that case, an exempt amount is fine. I'd just want it to be steep up to a point where it's 98 or 100%.

No one gets a third house before everyone gets one kinda thing. And also no one is allowed to have enough wealth they can destabilize democracy or even a city.

That's conservationists that conserve things. Conservatives work to consolidate power, reinstate kings. Like Donald and the conservative republicans.

As a follow-up, my ideal taxation plan looks like this:

When doing new, big projects, it makes sense to try them out on a small scale, then see how it goes and scale it up later. For an initial set of parameters, i propose the following:

Assume you live in country CNTRY.

• If you own less than the tax-exempt amount, you pay no wealth taxes at all. The tax-exempt amount is $10m.
• If you're a citizen of country CNTRY, no matter where you live, your total wealth gets calculated, and you have to pay wealth tax on everything above the tax-exempt amount to the country CNTRY. The tax rate is 3% annually. E.g. if you own $25m, the tax-exempt amount is $10m, and the non-exempt amount is $15m, so you pay $450k annually.
• If you're not a citizen of CNTRY, there is no tax-exempt amount for you and you have to start paying wealth tax on everything you own inside CNTRY. This is to avoid tax-avoidance schemes, like people investing in other countries to avoid paying taxes in their own countries. E.g. a person owning $250m might invest in 25 different countries, where in each of them the tax-exempt amount is $10m, sothat they don't pay taxes in any of the countries.