Germany's neoliberal economic policies (Die Zeit)

[Hannah Bell]

the essence is in the picture of angela merkel & the headline:

http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2009-10/angela-keynesianismus-bush

here's the translation:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zeit.de%2Fwirtschaft%2F2009-10%2Fangela-keynesianismus-bush&sl=de&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

[gooey]

1. I would work on the translations

[Hannah Bell]

2. tell it to google.

[JVS]

3. Oh boy. They are going to fuck themselves up!

[Selatius]

4. She only won because Shroeder really fucked up the Social Democrats with his austerity proposals.

It was an unpopular proposition at the outset. Cutting social programs in order to cut down on spending was a killer for the Social Democratic Party. They haven't recovered from that, and on top of that, the neo-liberal thinking has polluted the Social Democratic Party. The party was once unabashedly pro-worker, but in the 1990s and 2000s, they started moving towards neo-liberalism. If they really needed more revenue to avoid deficit spending, they should re-examine the tax structure and make it more progressive, but God cries at the thought of making relatively poorer folks pay less in taxes and shifting the burden up the income ladder.

Gerhard Shroeder is like Bill Clinton to the SDP. He held the top spot, but he had absolutely no political coattails for the rest of his party.