u/velanox

Competiton is always good for the consumer, sure, but too much of it is wasted money. It should be maybe 5-6 *Krankenkassen*, maybe bump that to 8-9, but this should be in no case a double-digit number. This is in my eyes the sweet spot for both preventing the formation of a cartell and simultaneously offering a wide range of services.

Just think about it, the current 96 companies all have to have their own C-suite, most likely several hundreds of employees - for what? This is a huge waste.

>Lifting the minimum wage directly impacts the available income of the lowest income classes, who in turn spend most of their income on consumption, increasing domestic demand and thus also helping the economy.

...except when it doesn't, because the ever-increasing contributions to the *Rentenversicherung* and *Krankenversicherung* just eat up all of the brutto increases, leaving people with effectively the same netto. Same applies for every wage increase for every other income class.

Your points are valid, however please note I never advocated for just reducing the income tax alone, but rather the *Abgabenlast* that all workers have to carry. Primarily health insurance and pension insurance.

These systems have become unsustainable (though I would argue they never really were, the issues were masked by a different age pyramid back in the day) and will have to be completely overhauled, the question is: **will someone take the plunge and do this before everything collapses?**

While that is, indeed, the *core* middle class, I don't think it's productive to act as if people earning more than the core (so exactly the 66k to 100k yearly) were somehow the bourgeouis that needed everything taken from them and taxed even harder. Especially considering that the capital tax in Germany is notoriously low.

Not to mention the fact that everyone who earns >70k yearly will switch to private health insurance instead of the government health insurance, thus ultimately resulting in the state having even less money.

This is definitely a point, but Germany's problem with the inefficient retirement and government healthcare systems (96 government providers? WHY?!) is a snowball that's been accelerating downhill for a long time and that needs to be addressed ASAP.

The systems need to be reformed, otherwise we're looking at exponentially rising costs for both of those systems that will have to be paid by the average citizen. The health insurance providers are running on fumes money-wise and have already had to increase the contribution factor significantly, and this is just the beginning.

It's ironic how SPD says "Wir dürfen uns keine Denkverbote auferlegen" (roughly meaning "We shouldn't be closed to any new thoughts") while suggesting to raise the health insurance assessment threshold from ~5500EUR/mo to ~8000EUR/mo, thus hitting middle-class even harder than it already is, without changing anything about the system itself.

This is pretty much the "We've been doing this for a long time already, why change anything?" mentality that hit Germans very hard when they had cheap gas cut off after having relied on it for several decades.

It's just sad that every politician from the GroKo is so fixated on lifting the minimum wage, which wouldn't bring much at all in the big picture, instead of reducing the enormous amount of various taxes that has to be paid from everybody's salary, which is currently around 40%. SPD even plans to *increase* the amount of taxes that the middle-class, everyone with an annual salary between 66k and 100k will have to pay. And the politicians sell this as "taxing the rich".

Not to deny your point, but I remember being disgusted by Instagram suggesting me blue hearts as emojis (blue for AfD, unsurprisingly) on a post that was relevant to German politics. Not sure what exactly the post was about, but I think something that had to do with migrants and/or greens.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the international TikTok (as opposed to Douyin, the Chinese version) has, to put it in an oversimplified way, a lot of American control over it, as that was the demand of the USA in exchange for not banning the app. Knowing the US-Russia relations, I'd say this makes a lot more sense than China meddling with elections. AfD is pro-russian first and foremost, we've seen Musk openly advocating for them. I strongly believe that it's the US+Russia combo that presents the most danger to the European democracy at the present moment.

As bad as TikTok is, I think Meta with its nonexistent content moderation is even worse. TikTok is at least decent at ensuring you don't see random gore in your feed like the one where a man was trampled by an elephant and which got recommended to half of the Instagram userbase.

Plus Meta owns Facebook AND Instagram for maximum control over all age groups: boomers and GenX on Facebook, millenials and zoomers on Instagram. It's far bigger a threat just by its "reach".

I also think it's often harder to give up Instagram (like Facebook!) because it's a tool for keeping contact with friends/acquaintances, unlike TikTok, which is, in my opinion, just a content consumption farm.

Having seen the absolute chaos and legitimate panic that happened in the US when TikTok was banned (for less than 24h or so, wasn't it?), I'm convinced a scary amount of people will figuratively explode if their toy is taken away.