Hard times for men and women
Up to 6,000 euros: There is a full purchase premium for these electric carsCar revolution: Germany and the e-car: the quiet before the electricity Watson.de: Tesla factory in Berlin? Plan causes ridicule on the web
Last but not least, East Germany will be among the winners. "With such a massive investment by Tesla, East Germany as a whole would take a big step forward in an important future industrial area"said the expert. The know-how and capacities in the field of electromobility and battery technology would be significantly strengthened in this country.
Auto expert Ferdinand Dudenhöffer also referred to Musk’s plans as "good news" also for VW, Daimler and BMW. "Competition has always made it possible to get better and faster."
Sources used: dpa news agency AFP news agency Reuters news agency show more sources less sources
There are too few women in East Germany. This has consequences for the satisfaction of men. And that in turn has a direct impact on the results of the state elections.
More men, less peace – this is how the American sociologist Valerie M. Hudson wrote a study on the gender ratio in China and India at the turn of the millennium. Their thesis: Societies with a clear surplus of men tend to be more aggressive. There are some indications that Hudson’s considerations can also help clear up the state election riddle last weekend.
Despite education and work, many men are dissatisfied
The finding is pretty clear: it’s the men who make the big difference. You, not the women, promoted the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Saxony and Brandenburg to the People’s Party. If you look for the particularly dissatisfied and embittered, you will find them more often in men than women, more often in East than in West Germany, more often in the Middle Ages than in the elderly or young people. Many men between 30 and 55 have work, most of them have a (middle) school leaving certificate and many have a partner. But they are not satisfied.
50 percent AfD – whom the people in this village still trust
50 percent AfD
Whom the people in this village still trust
Every time after an AfD election success, the question of why follows. This is the case again after the state elections. What offended and disappointed the East Germans so much? We went looking for AfD strongholds. more
The jobs are not what most hoped for. The middle school leaving certificate, the standard for almost 90 percent of the population in the GDR and in the first few years after the reunification in East Germany, is often no longer sufficient for a middle class life. Many find themselves in the lower or the threatened lower middle class. In the workers ‘and peasants’ state of the GDR, they still determined the social norm. Worse still: not even mathematically there is a partner for every man of marriageable age. The older single men are, the greater the gap becomes.
These men are right when they’re mad. Fate is not kind to them.
Hard times for men and women
The causes lie in the first ten years after reunification: men and women suffered equally from the collapse of the GDR’s economy. Except that women were hit harder by unemployment. When the industrial plants closed, men suddenly started applying for posts that they had previously considered unattractive. The public service, for example, traditionally a women’s domain in the GDR, now also became interesting for men. The result: women found it harder to return to work after being laid off than men if they stayed in the new federal states. Many made a virtue of necessity. The younger ones took their Abitur instead of leaving school after the tenth grade. As early as 1995, the number of women graduating from high school exceeded that of young men by half. Or they went to the west. Two thirds of all young migrants from the West between 1990 and 2005 were women.
Times were tough for the women and men who stayed. Two thirds of them had the experience of having to change their company or occupation, or of becoming unemployed. The consequence of the uncertainty can be seen in the decline in the birth rate. In 1994, only a third as many children were born in the area of the former GDR as eight years earlier.
There is no prospect of starting a family
The consequences of the birth and internal migration shock are making themselves felt just now. Because women usually choose men of the same age or older, and preferably even better educated, as partners, today an above-average number of men of the Wendekind generation lack the prospect of being able to start a family.
A woman over 30 is more likely to be struck by lightning than to find a new partner. This nasty saying was called after female singles in West Germany in the 1990s. Today he meets men in many areas of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony.how to write a conclusion to an argumentative essay The situation is particularly dire for the less educated. Here, an unbound woman can arithmetically choose between three men, as a study for 2012 calculated. Does such a situation make those affected happy? No – at least not if they are men.
East Germany has to win over women
What does that mean for politics? The possibilities of the present are limited. In order for the men to be better in the medium term, three things have to happen.
First, boys absolutely have to get better school qualifications and then start an apprenticeship or study. Pushing them to do so is the job of parents and teachers.
Second: The best thing to do is move temporarily to cities like Hamburg or Berlin – there is a clear excess of women there.
News blog about the elections: All information and reactions Comment on the election results: A resounding slap in the face Analysis of the state election: The AfD is cheering, but not governing – and that’s okay
And third: East Germany must win over women. Today, however, you can no longer do it the way Asa Mercer, founder of Washington University, once did: The man from the Wild West sailed around the American continent in the 1860s to meet widows and unmarried women in Boston and New York convince them to seek their fortune in Seattle. To the indignation of the locals, of course. But an immigration law that privileges women could also be made today.
Ursula Weidenfeld is a business journalist in Berlin. Your book is called "Government without a people. Why our political system no longer works" and has been published by Rowohlt Berlin.
Sources used: Berlin Institute for Population and Development, Not am Mann, From heroes of work to the new lower class, Berlin 2007Steffen Mau, Lütten Klein, Life in the East German Transformation Society, Berlin 2019Karl Ulrich Mayer, Heike Solgau, CVs in the German-German unification process, SOEP Papers322, Berlin 2010. Andreas Reckwitz, Gesellschaft der Singularitäten, Berlin 2017Valerie M. Hudson, Andrea Boer, A Surplus of Men, a Deficit of Peace: Security and Sex Ratios in Asia’s Largest States, in: International Security 26/4 , 2002.more sources show less sources
The Federal Minister of Finance had submitted a proposal to EU partners on the taxation of share purchases. This has now been declared ineffective – rightly?
If there was a competition for the most senseless taxes, Olaf Scholz’s planned Europe-wide financial transaction tax would have good prospects for one of the top places. Because it is ineffective, inefficient and unjust. Worse still, it will have no influence whatsoever on the future stability of the financial markets.
How did the financial transaction tax come about?
In order to understand what the new tax is supposed to be good for, one has to know its history. In the opinion of many financial politicians, the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 was triggered by a speculative bubble on the stock and derivatives markets. This was also due to the fact that ever larger amounts of securities were being traded ever faster. Computers took advantage of the smallest price differences on the world’s stock exchanges to buy or sell. Moving securities at breakneck speed in a global market destabilizes the financial market. That should no longer be worthwhile in the future.
In addition, the speculators should share in the costs of the financial crisis. That is why finance ministers around the world came up with the idea of simply putting a tax on trading in securities. Small price differences would then no longer be worthwhile for traders, and the financial market would become more stable. This is the theory of the so-called Tobin Tax. Its inventor, the American economist James Tobin, wanted to combat very short-term foreign exchange speculation.
In the years after the financial crisis, approval crumbled: large trading centers did not want to participate. The financial markets stabilized even without tax. The banks paid a bank levy in a common pot so that in the event of future financial crises, the industry itself could pay for the damage caused. Not even in the European Union could an agreement be reached. Only ten countries are willing to take part.
Tax concerns only a fraction of European companies
In order to understand why Olaf Scholz’s plans are bad, one only has to look at the faintheartedness of the draft that the finance minister is currently promoting to his colleagues: here, no financial transaction tax is advertised, but a pure share tax. The purchase of papers from large stock corporations with a market value of more than one billion euros will in future be taxed at 0.2 percent of the investment capital. Only around 500 companies in the ten EU countries would be affected. Derivatives and bonds, on the other hand, remain tax-free, as do, of course, papers from countries that have already given up. These include large financial centers such as Ireland, Spain, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
The tax will therefore have no influence whatsoever on the stability of the financial markets. More conservative investors will have to pay the tax, while gamblers can avoid it. Even large investors who can choose when, where and how quickly to act will avoid the tax anyway.
Optimists vs. critic
Why do you do something that won’t have any effect? Well-meaning people say it’s just the beginning. If the tax were to unfold fully over the years, all participants in the financial markets would be covered. Other countries would participate, and after the next financial crisis at the latest, an instrument would then be available that could quickly be rolled out worldwide.
Share tax: Scholz’s proposal meets with displeasureMedia report: Scholz apparently presents a draft for a tax on share purchasesBuy shares: How to get started
Skeptics see it differently: The finance minister had mouthed too much when he promised to enforce the Europe-wide transaction tax with his colleagues. Now he has to save face and advertise the miniature version of the originally planned tax to cover up his failure. Scholz also needs money. The ruling coalition finally agreed to finance the SPD basic pension plans with the share tax. The finance minister expects a total of 1.5 billion euros from the new tax. That is more than bringing alcopop, beer and coffee taxes, but still significantly less than the state collects from betting and lottery taxes.
Ursula Weidenfeld is a business journalist in Berlin. She produces the podcast together with t-online.de and the Leibniz Association "Sound track knowledge".
What to do if the money melts while saving Only those who already have a lot benefit from the recommendation to get rid of the savings book and invest in stocks.
So far, the low interest rates have been just annoying for most investors – now things are really starting to hurt: Many private investors will have to expect negative interest rates this autumn, around 140 banks and savings banks are already charging their customers "Custody fees". Exemptions of EUR 100,000 upwards still apply, but if the ECB continues its policy of easy money, these limits will soon be gradually corrected downwards. Savers are trapped – unless they decide to invest their wealth differently. This is particularly difficult for Germans.
Saving is a burden for the economy and banks
It is now becoming clear to the last of the traditionalists how much the world has changed in the past ten years.