How Germany got it right on the economy

Washington Post ^ | 11/24/2010 | Harold Meyerson

[SeekAndFind]

It may be turkey week in America, but it's goose month in Germany. In many restaurants, you can get goose in your salad and goose in your soup to go with your goose entrée. Diners fairly honk their way through November.

But then, Germans have something to honk about. Germany's economy is the strongest in the world. Its trade balance - the value of its exports over its imports - is second only to China's, which is all the more remarkable since Germany is home to just 82 million people. Its 7.5 percent unemployment rate - two percentage points below ours - is lower than at any time since right after reunification. Growth is robust, and real wages are rising.

It's quite a turnabout for an economy that American and British bankers and economists derided for years as the sick man of Europe. German banks, they insisted, were too cautious and locally focused, while the German economy needed to slim down its manufacturing sector and beef up finance.

Wisely, the Germans declined the advice. Manufacturing still accounts for nearly a quarter of the German economy; it is just 11 percent of the British and U.S. economies (one reason the United States and Britain are struggling to boost their exports). Nor have German firms been slashing wages and off-shoring - the American way of keeping competitive - to maintain profits.

One key to Germany's miracle is the mittelstand, as the family-owned small and mid-size manufacturing firms that dominate the economy are known. Last week, I visited AWS Achslagerwerk, a factory of one such firm, in the farmlands of Saxony-Anhalt, about two hours west of Berlin. As in many such companies, this factory turns out specialized products: axle-box housings for Chinese and German high-speed trains, machine tools requiring climate-controlled precision measurement.

[Will88]

Only Congress can create laws.

A democrat Congress wrote the laws that authorized and created the EPA.

So what? Learn something about how the most important legislation passed in the US came about and you will find a president and executive branch spearheading the initiative and probably outlining and being involved in writing much of it. And the major legislation often makes good on a campaign promise made by a presidential candidate.

And, only a president can sign legislation into law. Nixon could have vetoed the creation of the EPA, except that he actually spearheaded it.

You just don't want to accept the fact that you can't blame everything on the Dims back in 1970, or since.

And who was it that signed legislation to make the incandescent light bulb illegal, and require the new fluorescent bulbs, just about three years ago?

This is a waste of time, and far from the original topic of this thread.

[Democrat_media]

democrats have always been socialists/Marxists.

FDR a democrat and his democrat Congresses imposed upon America a lot of socialist laws including the New deal.

This was in the 1930’s.

You really think all these hundreds of thousands of pages of government regulations don’t cripple American manufactuers and businesses. Government/socialism doesn’t work: Just look at the TSA stooges.

[Will88]

And, then, the liberals got ahold of them...and distorted them into blunt instruments to attack American freedoms.

That's true, and some of those liberals were Republicans, and some of them were named Bush and Ford and Nixon.

Do you know who put a moratorium on more area for offshore exploration and new drilling than any other president, and which presidents continued it?

Do you know who signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, No Child Left Behind, who supported and worked on Goals 2000 that Clinton later signed?

The problem is, with the exception of Reagan, the Republican presidents haven't been so different from the Dim presidents on many issues since the 1960s. The problem is not the difference between Democrats and Republicans, but the different between conservatives and progressives, and the progressives have been found in both parties and especially in the federal courts on many issues.

[Conservative Tsunami]

Let me clue author Harold Meyerson in on just one thing:

GERMANY DOES NOT SHARE A BORDER WITH MEXICO.

[Will88]

democrats have always been socialists/Marxists.

Including all those very conservative southern Democrats pre-1970 or so? There were NO Republican office holders in the South from the late 1800s until around the 1970s. Do you think the southern Democrats were anti-war during the 1960s?

As I've said, you don't understand the make-up of Congress that existed in the time period I mention above. All southerners in Congress were conservative, and Democrats. And there were many very liberal Republicans from northern states. And the voting alignments around various issues were different than what we have today, where most Dims are very liberal and most Republicans conservative on most issues.

You need to find some of the voting records on major legislation pre-1970 and see how the Democrats and Republicans voted on various issue. It will probably be as much by region as by party on many issues.

[Right_Wing_Madman]

Another reason for Germany's resurgence that the Washington Post would rather not mention: when she took office, Merkel and her party slashed the corporate tax from 50% to 25%. As a result, German exports have boomed and unemployment dropped four points. Funny how that works.

[SeekAndFind]

Slashing the tax burden on companies almost always helps to stabilize the economy and encourages companies to expand, and take risk.

You’ve just shown how it’s working for Germany (which has to shoulder the burden of the EU on its back)

The precedents even here in the USA are too numerous that only the willfully ignorant can miss it.

Count them -— Warren Harding, JFK, Ronald Reagan, even Clinton in his second term ( nudged on by Congress of course ), and Dubya after 9/11.

Tax cuts together with SPENDING RESTRAINT, that’s the real ticket.