cocolowlander

I know it's needed, but I'm always worried about the French budget. Their debt to GDP is not healthy right now. On the other hand, the Germans should be spending more.

I don't see AfD supporting debt brake reform, because they present themselves as fiscal hawks (and I reckon AfD wants CDU to fail so they can pick up voters from them).

But the Greens and whoever else should definitely negotiate with CDU for spending on vital infrastructure like electrical grid, rail, energy storage, etc. German economy is wrecked right now due to lack of demand, and Germany has excess industrial capacity to build out these physical investments that will pay off in the future.

Also sadly for Germany, if CDU fails, next election you might be looking at AfD led government like what happened in Netherlands.

As a non-German, I don't want to comment on a sensitive topic like migration, but my thoughts on the economic policy.

Page 2 of the translated document:

2. a special fund federal/state/municipal infrastructure is created, which will have a volume of 500 billion euros and a term of 10 years. This special fund is to be used for investments in infrastructure serve. This includes, in particular, civil protection civil defense, and transport infrastructure, hospital investments, investments in the energy infrastructure, in the education, care and science infrastructure, in , in the research and development development and digitization. 100 billion euros of this is to be allocated to the municipalities are available for the above-mentioned areas

I'm not sure if CDU/SPD has enough votes to bypass/amend the debt brake rules (from what I remember reading, it was written into the Constitution).

But Germany really needs this especially on things like rail (for public mass transportation), electrical grid (to connect Northern renewable offshore wind to Southern Germany), and digitization (hopefully not American spyware but European services like Linux, EU cloud, etc. ).

More competition will ensure the oligarchs to behave.

I don't trust the EU tech owners, but I recognize that they are at an disadvantage to the US counterpart (and nationalism is a useful tool to sell their product) so they won't be making overt moves to dismantle European democracy.

Will check it out!

Maybe petition local government to transition their IT into EU based service?

I know it will probably fall on deaf ears, but I'm thinking about contacting my local politicians about transitioning government IT into Linux OS and EU Cloud service. I don't expect them to take me seriously, but at least I can take four hours of my life every half year.

The network effect makes it very difficult. It's like pulling teeth right now to convince my spouse to give up on Instagram.