Max Sawicky wrote:
> My numbers and cite were for social spending.
Yes, but social spending is a very broad term, and much of what is statistically counted as social spending in Germany is not assistance for the poor.
For example, so-called "Elterngeld" ("parental money"). This was created by the previous government (CDU-SPD) and was the pet project of then family minister, now labour minister Ursula von der Leyen. It replaced an older program called "Erziehungsgeld" ("child rearing money"). The innovation with "Elterngeld" was that it was specifically targeted to encourage upper class and upper middle-class women to have more babies, to counter the supposed demographic decline of ethnic Germans. It is supposed to encourage these women to take a period of pause from high powered careers in order to reproduce the higher social classes.
Because it was replacing Erziehungsgeld, Elterngeld was also payed to poor people. If you were a Hartz IV recipient, you got 300 Euro Elterngeld not calculated against your Hartz IV.
Now, as part of the austerity packet of the current government, Elterngeld for Hartz IV recipients is going to be abolished. With the justification, of course, that people who don't work shouldn't be offered extra financial incentive to have children. The original intent, you recall, was to encourage rich women to have more kids. The problem, of course, is that Elterngeld is not just paid to rich career women, but also to rich housewives who have also never worked a day in their lives.
So in effect, a subsidy for rich women to bear more children is "social spending", statistically speaking.
That should illustrate sufficiently, I think, how much caution to exercise when talking about "social spending" in Germany as a broad category.