More guns, less butter: the EU is choosing more weapons, less welfare

24 February 20242 months ago babelfish

How do we do it, in a Europe of austerity, of debt reduction, with the need to increase spending on armaments? Because, whether Trump is elected or not, in any case someone, including us, will have, or should, spend more on weapons: if we want to get along with Trump, in any case reaching the spending of 2% of GDP on defense, if you want to send the new president to hell, to improve defense without NATO. The problem is particularly burning for the Germany of the "Semaforo" coalition, which includes the Greens, Socialists and Liberals.

Spiegel says it clearly :

Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner has called for a multi-year moratorium on social spending and subsidies in order to invest more money in defense .

Obviously this message is not very appealing to those who still call themselves left, with a bit of shame, like the greens:

Green leader Ricarda Lang also said that Germany must invest more money to support Ukraine and to help make Europe more independent from the United States in defense. But: “We must not pit external security against the country's internal social security.” It will not be possible to finance these tasks with the current budget. “We have to find other ways to do it.”

Obviously, from the German perspective, this is not possible, so the austere economist on duty immediately intervenes to bring order and say NEIN, you can't have more butter and more cannons together, as the greens would like:

Clemens Fuest, president of the economic research institute Ifo, believes that cuts in the social sector cannot be avoided. »Cannons and butter – it would be nice if it were possible. But this is a land of milk and honey. It does not work. But weapons without butter: the welfare state will continue to be financed. “But it will just be smaller.”

I think no one has ever thought that Germany is the “Land of milk and honey”, unless you belong to the industrial elite, whether you are a Krupp, or a Porsche, or a large corporation like BASF ( Former IG Farben), or a large bank. However, precisely because resources are scarce, is it right to throw them into reckless policies, like the entire bungled energy revolution of the last ten years, or now weapons which, just as the Ukrainian conflict reveals, will probably be useless?

Very few people ask themselves this question, and very few on the left…

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The article More guns, less butter: the EU is choosing more weapons, less welfare comes from Economic Scenarios .

This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/piu-cannoni-meno-burro-la-ue-sta-scegliendo-piu-armi-meno-stato-sociale/ on Sat, 24 Feb 2024 20:51:54 +0000.