Hubertus Heil’s proposal is intended to cushion the rising CO2 price and create incentives to save energy. But he is controversial.
(Photo: dpa)
Hubertus Heil was once a pragmatic economic politician. Like every social democrat, he wanted to make the world a bit fairer, but unlike many social politicians, he always knew that the funds for social spending are finite.
But as social affairs minister, Heil mutated more and more into a make-a-wish politician. The most recent example is his new push for climate money. This is as unimaginative in socio-political terms as it is creative in terms of political callousness.
In principle, climate money is the right idea. It is intended to cushion the rising CO2 price and create incentives to save energy. It also makes sense to create a social balance, because combating climate change goes hand in hand with bitter struggles over distribution.
But Heil, his new proposal is not about the climate, but about making voters happy. Through the back door, he relabeled the climate money as a relief package for incomes suffering from high energy prices.
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The political motivation behind this is obvious: The SPD is convinced that it lost the election in North Rhine-Westphalia because it did not make inflation a sufficient topic during the election campaign.
Holes are plugged with tax money
That’s why the Social Democrats want to distribute tranquilizer pills before the elections in Lower Saxony. The SPD is thus consistently advancing on a political path of bad decisions: because they messed up the first relief packages due to a lack of targeting, they now think they have to plug the holes in the previous projects with even bigger measures.
Who is going to pay for all this? Heil owes an answer to this question. In any case, the income from the CO2 price that he mentions is already planned twice or three times over.
Funding social transfers through debt, as in the first two relief packages, would be the definitive entry into voodoo fiscal policy. But if Heil still claims to be more than just a minister of redistribution, he could scour his gigantic social budget for savings opportunities.
Heil’s proposal comes at a time when the traffic light is running out of funds because it wants to comply with the debt brake again from 2023. The climate money is thus becoming a burden for the new government and, above all, a major test for Federal Finance Minister Lindner: He now has to prove that the FDP is the market-economy corrective to red-green, even under the pressure of the general political climate.
More: Liberals are strangers to Minister of Labor Heil’s push for climate money