Quote: Original post by MDI
Both the French and British governments were privately against the reunification of Germany. They feared marrying a first-world nation with an essentially dirt poor, third-world nation would bring West Germany's economy down, and with it the rest of Europe. This wasn't some wacky fear, it was a very real risk at the time.

Fear and risk are not preceisely the right words. The reunification pretty much ruined Germany. A few people filled their pockets just fine, but for the greater part, this was the greatest desaster since the war.

Some of the major roads in the west look like we're in the middle a war, as they have seen no repairs during the last 20 years. Things that belong to the most basic infrastructure, such as electricity, phone, or water are ailing and failing since they are over 30 years old and have seen no maintenance during the last two decades. Cities and communes are at the brink of bankruptcy.

Taxes, social insurance, and increasing annuity assurances suck the life out of a lot of "middle class" people in the west, and that is in spite of the fact that medical care and social security are as bad as they have never been before and the fact that the bigger part of the population is being cheated for heir annuity in a way that can at best be called criminal.

Interestingly enough, the people in the east complain that everything got much worse for them, too, and from what I can tell not all complaints are even unreasonable.
Some mayors of the now richest and best maintained cities with the most modern infrastructures (all of which are in the east) openly admit that they don't really need the billions that they drain out of the "solidary pact" every year, but hey, why not take the money anyway. On the other hand, there seems to be very little left over for the common man or for such a simple thing as daycare or education.
Unemployment in the east is scary (it is high in the west, but the east is outright scary), and there is no outlook for it getting better any time soon. As a result, some major areas are devoid of qualified people, because everyone who gets a chance to move moves. Medical care (in particular ambulatory) in some counties is practically non-existent.

So yeah, the reunification was a really big step in Germany's way to total world domination.

Quote: Original post by samoth

Quote: Original post by MDI
Both the French and British governments were privately against the reunification of Germany. They feared marrying a first-world nation with an essentially dirt poor, third-world nation would bring West Germany's economy down, and with it the rest of Europe. This wasn't some wacky fear, it was a very real risk at the time.

Fear and risk are not preceisely the right words. The reunification pretty much ruined Germany. A few people filled their pockets just fine, but for the greater part, this was the greatest desaster since the war.

According to the chart Lessbread posted above their GDP looks to be in proportion to their size. How do you reconcile that with the idea that reunification has been a disaster?

A couple more stats might help.

List of countries by GDP (PPP) (2008), List of countries by population, List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita (2009), List of countries by income equality

European Union 	15,247,163 $M -----  501,259,840 -----  32,700 I$ ---  30.7Germany 	 2,910,490 $M 19.1%   81,757,600 16.3%  34,219 I$ #22  28.3United Kingdom 	 2,230,549 $M 14.6%   62,041,708 12.4%  35,165 I$ #20  36.0France 	         2,130,383 $M 14.0%   65,447,374 13.1%  33,744 I$ #23  32.7Italy 	         1,814,557 $M 11.9%   60,250,535 12.0%  29,290 I$ #29  36.0Spain 	         1,396,881 $M  9.2%   45,989,016  9.2%  29,527 I$ #28  34.7

Germany has the lowest income inequality of those five nations. It has 20 million more people than the UK and $500 billion more in GDP but $1000 less per capita.

Quote: Original post by laeuchli
According to the chart Lessbread posted above their GDP looks to be in proportion to their size. How do you reconcile that with the idea that reunification has been a disaster?

Easy, I live in that country. These charts are all nice, but they tell nothing because they are based on governmental lies. Or, if you don't like the word "lie", we can say "half the truth" instead.

Let's start with unemployment figures, for example. When the governmental lie says 6.7% in west, and 12.1% in east Germany, a figure of 15% and 25% is much more realistic, if one was being honest. The point is, the vast majority of jobless simply isn't counted in that statistic. If you fall under one of the numerous categories (1-Euro job, Ich-AG, older than 58, unemployed longer than 2 years, ...) then you simply don't count for the statistic. Married? Your wife has a job? Doesn't count. Nice if you can twist numbers any way you want, isn't it.
Why do you think there are so many neo-nazis in east Germany now? How do ultra right-wing parties suddenly gain popularity again? Surely this is not happening because young people have a job and a perspective and because they are happy with their lives.

GDP is a nice number, but it doesn't say anything. The "normal average guy" such as the one in the supermarket down the street gets around 800 Euros per month. That's 680 Euros after income tax, and 577 Euros after applying "solidary tax", church tax, unemployment and healtcare insurance.
After paying the annuity fee (which does NOT imply that you ever get an annuity!), 417 Euros remain. Now, try and feed a family from that, considering that an apartment which isn't a total rathole costs 400-500 per month. Oh wait, you wanted to eat too, didn't you.

I mentioned annuity. There is something called "contract of the generations" which basically says you have to pay for the annuity of the old, and when you get old, someone else will pay for you. Except, at the reunification, the government noticed that there was no money in the pool in the east at all, but saying so would have been bad publicity. So they said "no worries, you will all get the best annuity you can dream of", expecting that someone else would be in the government until it all broke down. And that's exactly how it happened too.
Now, people like for example my parents who have paid for their annuity for over 40 years are taxed on the already low "income" from their annuity and have to pay social security fees from it. The trick behind this double-taxation is of course simply to give old people less money. Hey, they're old, so no worries. Old dogs don't bite.
On the other hand, pretty much everyone else at my age is told "the future of annuity is gloomy (read as: fuck you!), if you want an annuity later, you better make a contract with a private company for that. See, there is this GREAT Riester subvention that we offer to you because we are so kind".
However, the bitter truth is nothing more than that you've already paid for 20 years under the premise of a binding contract, and the government simply breaks this contract. If you did such a thing, you would go to jail right away. You also have to pay for another 20 years whether you want or not, knowing that you'll never get anything back.
I'm somewhat lucky in that respect because I belong to the small "elite" which is allowed to bypass that system, but most people are stuck with it for their lives, which isn't precisely fair.
Similar can be said about healtcare insurance. If I need an appointment, I pick up the phone and tell them that I'll be there in an hour. No questions asked. If my parents need an appointment, they're told "let's see... maybe we can arrange something in 3 weeks?". Tell me about social fairness and not having a two-class system in Germany.

Take fuel prices as another example. Sure enough, oil gets more expensive, I would have to be an idiot to not recognize this.
However, oil has "only" gotten nearly twice as expensive during the last 20 years, whereas gasoline has become about 2.6 times as expensive (roughly 7 USD/gallon), most which (67.6%) is tax.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not complaining about tax as such. Tax is a necessary means for a state to acquire money to build schools, roads, etc.
Also, you could consider a car as something "luxury".
The problem is, however, tax always goes up and no schools or roads are built! The only thing going up lockstep with taxes is the remuneration for members of parliament (currently 13,536 Euros per month, of which 3,868 are tax-free, so it's more like a 15,000 Euro income, effectively).
Also, a car is not "luxury" at all to most people who have a job, it is simply a necessity. Going to the city from the town where I live (about 15 km distance) costs me 3.80 Euros one way (5.18 USD) using public transports. This is 3.4 times more expensive than it was 20 years ago. Surely, you can get it a little cheaper if you buy a monthly subscription, but it doesn't change the general idea.

I could continue with this for hours, but then I'd probably be all angry for the rest of the day, so let's best stop the ranting :-)

Take away the east/west merger issue and samoth's story might as well be about the US. Regarding EU hegemony: it almost seems inevitable (taking human nature into account) that one day a certain EU country will assume the leadership position. If Germany can keep its head above water until then, it would seem to stand just as good a chance as the other major players.

The level of ridiculous in this thread is staggering.

If you look at what smaller countries in the EU are really worried about, it's that France and Germany will together dominate the union. Also keep in mind that Thatcher is from the UK, and the UK has traditionally been one of the least enthusisastic members of the EU. So take anything they say about the EU with a spoonful of salt.

There is another, slightly roundabout reason why national politicians aren't interested in dominating the EU (backroom dealings not withstanding, but for true domination your opponents will force you to do it out in the open). The reason is that, for national governments, the EU is a very useful tool for implementing unpopular crappy laws. It works like this: governments secretely really want a crappy unpopular law, and they know there's no way the people in their country would go with it. So they lobby on an EU level to get it passed there. Later, when it comes to implement the law on a national level, they point to Brussels and it's nobody's fault. I don't think any politician wants to give that up, which is what they would have to do if they openly dominated Brussels.

That said, obviously Germany plays a big role in the EU just by its size. The real test is whether that role is bad for the EU or not, and it seems we've mostly learned our lesson in the last century (though the current arrogance against Greece I notice among my countrymen is sickening - as if Greece got where they are now just by their own mistakes).

The other part of teh ridiculous is about the reunification and the economic situation of Germany.

samoth, have you ever been to the US? Now there's a first world country that looks like a third world one. There's no comparison to Germany here on an infrastructure level, so let's keep it realistic.

The problem we have in Germany aren't reunification debts, we've had 20 years to deal with those. The problem is that our politicians have bought into the ideology that government is bad so much that they have blinded themselves to solutions to the problem. (Of course, if you think government is bad you don't let the government do anything to fix the problem, and so the problem doesn't get fixed.)

As an example - consider the wages problem you mentioned. These are not the result of reunification, they are the result of a very conscious policy to reduce wages that started with the government under chancellor Schröder. Don't believe me? Look it up, Schröder himself was proud of creating the so-called "Niedriglohnsektor".

Also, people who actually earn as little as in your example can get subsidies from the state. This is good for those people, but very bad in the long run, because now companies are incentivized to pay people ridiculously low wages. There are actually companies who encourage their full-time employees to get additional money from government because the wages are so low!

These kinds of practices need to be stopped (whether by a minimum wage as is standard in almost all other first world countries or by some other means, I don't really care that much), but anything that would actually increase wages in Germany won't happen because the current federal government has bought too much into the ideology that higher wages are automatically evil. (The level of economic stupidity in our current government is staggering!)

It has *nothing* to do with either the reunification or the EU, the entire crappy situation is of our own making and mainly due to policies of the last ten years or so, though of course the ideological foundations for these policies have been laid earlier (yes, it's also my fault for still voting for the so-called Social Democrats in 2005; not much is social about their policies anymore, and they are only very slowly waking up to that fact now that they're in the opposition).

Quote: Original post by Silvermyst
Take away the east/west merger issue and samoth's story might as well be about the US. Regarding EU hegemony: it almost seems inevitable (taking human nature into account) that one day a certain EU country will assume the leadership position. If Germany can keep its head above water until then, it would seem to stand just as good a chance as the other major players.

Is there any one state that has a leadership position within the US? No? There you go.

Germany has been politically and militarily inept since WW2. No one takes german politicians serious at an international level and the Bundeswehr is the laughing stock of afghanistan but still we're not puny enough to finally stop the world domination bullshit.

One thing I forgot to reply to:

Quote:
The problem is, however, tax always goes up and no schools or roads are built!

This is not true. Or rather, it is very misleading. The problem isn't so much that taxes go up, it's how taxes are redistributed.

Throughout the last decade in Germany, taxes which are generally independent of income and wealth, such as VAT and taxes on gas have indeed gone up. On the other hand, taxes which depend on income have gone down significantly for those in the top income bracket. In particular, high end income tax levels are at a record low, there is no tax at all on wealth, taxes on inheritances have been reduced significantly, taxes for income generated from selling companies, you name it, they've all been reduced.

The net result is two-fold:

1. The particular structure of tax reduction has encouraged the kind of corrupt business practices that have caused the entire destruction of companies for short-term profits of a handful of owners, at the costs of at least hundreds of thousands of jobs, and that have in addition helped create the current world economic mess we find ourselves in.

2. The wealth has been shifted drastically from the poorest to the richest on average. While this may have helped German export industry, the benefit of that is questionable considering the extreme misbalancing of German exports vs. imports (the latter is also causing big problems for Euroland because as a net effect Germany essentially sucks money out of countries like Spain). More importantly, it has entirely destroyed the local market inside Germany because most people just don't have the money to spend.

There is a systematic sickness here which can only be cured by getting people to understand that many of the "truths" spread these days are in fact lies, or half-truths at best. Some examples:

1. Managers have to be paid exorbitant salaries, otherwise companies cannot attract or keep talent.
2. Highly qualified people will stop working and go abroad if they have to pay high taxes.
3. Germany needs to pay low wages to stay internationally competitive.
4. A tax on stock market transactions can only work on an international level.

These are just some examples of the noise and negative signal in the media. Yes, there may be a grain of truth to some of them, but ultimately they just distract from the real question, which is this:

We have the technology to be living in a truly Golden Era of progress and wealth for everybody. Why don't we make it happen?

[And I don't mean that in a communist sense. I mean it in the mechanism design sense of How can we make the market work for the small gal instead of against her?]

Quote: Original post by Prefect
Throughout the last decade in Germany, taxes which are generally independent of income and wealth, such as VAT and taxes on gas have indeed gone up. On the other hand, taxes which depend on income have gone down significantly for those in the top income bracket. In particular, high end income tax levels are at a record low, there is no tax at all on wealth, taxes on inheritances have been reduced significantly, taxes for income generated from selling companies, you name it, they've all been reduced.

That sounds like the USA.

Quote: Original post by Prefect
There is a systematic sickness here which can only be cured by getting people to understand that many of the "truths" spread these days are in fact lies, or half-truths at best. Some examples:

1. Managers have to be paid exorbitant salaries, otherwise companies cannot attract or keep talent.
2. Highly qualified people will stop working and go abroad if they have to pay high taxes.
3. Germany needs to pay low wages to stay internationally competitive.
4. A tax on stock market transactions can only work on an international level.

Again, those are similar to the economic bromides turned conventional wisdom in the USA. Over here the variation on #2 is that talent will move out of state. The more typical expression however is that companies will move out of state or overseas.

The USA remains hegemonic.