Finally lunch break. Sorry, again longer, but that’s just how it is.
You just assume that healthy people voluntarily prefer to live on citizen’s income rather than go to work. Have you ever lived on about 30% of the median income? No one voluntarily subjects themselves to that. As I said, the actual number of such conscious total refusers is not known because determining it would require an incredible personnel, bureaucratic, and financial effort; this would require weeks of control visits, possibly surveillance by detectives, psychological and medical assessments to make it reasonably legally secure. The number of 14-16 thousand results from the number of sanctions applied, which, as mentioned, are also issued for repeated missed appointments. This also includes people who are mentally ill, don’t know where and why they have to appear, and what consequences might threaten. So before you cut all benefits, you have to make sure that the person is fully able to work, understand what sanctions mean and what the steps leading to them are, and then the person must still decide not to take up the activities. Additionally, it must be determined beyond doubt whether the activity is really reasonable, because this is also individual and cannot be determined across the board.
My personal opinion is that someone who voluntarily lives on citizen’s income, although physically able to work, very likely has psychological or cognitive impairments. And that would first have to be excluded before denying such a person the absolute subsistence minimum.
Again, there are much bigger levers than tackling the so-called total refusers. I do not want tax money to be wasted on pure symbolic politics that changes nothing in the overall situation.
Incidentally, France and Italy have a higher social benefits quota than Germany.
And listen, if you don’t want any social security and prefer anarchocapitalism, you can emigrate to Argentina now; it probably won’t be better for you there, but at least you know that everyone is equally badly off...
A wealth tax could bring us 80 billion per year with appropriate exemptions and a procedural cost rate of 3%.
The rich would not become poorer; they would just get less rich as quickly. How can one demand inhumane policies for peanuts, but defend the spoils of one’s own exploiters? That’s just schizophrenic.
Most people here are not affected at all. The claim that you could belong to them someday is a LIE, a fairy tale told to make you comply and rather kick downwards and sideways instead of targeting the real freeloaders.
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Yes, Poland has harsher conditions for Ukrainian refugees than Germany. Which has mainly led to most Ukrainians simply leaving Poland again. I cannot legally assess this for Poland, but constitutionally it is no different in Germany. Ukrainians enjoy subsidiary protection as war refugees and are therefore entitled to citizen’s income. In this respect, it is also a bait-and-switch by Union/FDP politicians to now demand paying Ukrainians less; that would simply be unconstitutional.
By the way, the number of unemployed Ukrainians is also exaggerated because of around 1.1-1.2 million Ukrainians in Germany,
894 thousand are of working age (about 290 thousand <15 years, about 124 thousand >65)
531 thousand are registered as employable
In August 24, 221 thousand were employed subject to social security, additionally 51 thousand were marginally employed.
100 thousand not registered as unemployed are in integration courses, and simply dismissing the language barrier here as insignificant is, to say the least, tendentious. Of course, German is significantly harder to learn, and at the same time, the spread of Russian or Ukrainian in German workplaces is less common.
206 thousand are registered as unemployed. Most of them have no completed vocational training and can therefore only be employed as helpers or semi-skilled workers or trainees, where there is currently no pronounced shortage.
Europe-wide, the employment rate of Ukrainians in Germany is in the midfield, so one cannot say that the citizen’s income leads to a disproportionately high unemployment rate of Ukrainians.