It's true they weren't responsible for the situation they found themselves in, that's on the Berlin CDU - my wishes for whom might get me banned here.
However, as I noted, it's not just that they sold the units, it's the combination of that with doing nothing to combat the foreseeable rent increases.
Modernize the allowed housing development plans for land that had already been released for development? No.
Release enough more land for housing development? No.
At the very least reduce or speed up the bureaucratic overhead required for housing development? No.
All three options would have at least contributed to mitigating the situation and were achievable without straining the state budget - especially the second one might've even been a net contributor if handled smartly. They did none of them - and it's not like this is a case of hindsight 20/20, this was all known at the time.
As a leftist: The youngest people don't recall that is was the Berlin-"PDS/Linke" going all-in on neoliberal privatization with Wowereit's Berlin-SPD from 2002-2011. They sold off the biggest chunk of state-owned housing, slashed funding for building replacement units, and made zero effort to mitigate the obviously following rising rents via new housing until it was much too late.
I'm willing to extend the federal Linke a line of trust, since they haven't been in a government coalition, yet. The Berlin-Linke, however, I cannot trust to actually stand behind left policies - they have done too much of the exact opposite in the past.
Very roughly: Money taken out of your salary, which goes into health insurance, pension insurance, nursing care insurance, and unemployment insurance, as well as some other minor specialized levies like U1 (to fund part of your income in sickness), U2 (to fund part of your income in motherhood), and U3 (to fund part of your income in case your employer goes insolvent). For most people, they are typically all mandatory.
About half of the first three plus U1, U2, and U3 are taken out of your "total" salary as the employer sees it (they are part of the total cost of your labor). The rest is taken out of the "gross" amount you see on your salary statement (the cost you agreed to in your work contract)*. That's why there are two differently shaded turquiose areas in the graph.
The full details are more complicated.
* Most people here in Germany don't even know about these additional levies, as they don't show up on your income statement. Same as the half subtracted before the gross ("before taxes") number you see on it; plenty of people still think "the employer pays the other half of my social contributions", which is only correct if you don't consider the total mandatory cost of your labor your salary - which imho is asinine, because that's the value your labor must exceed in order to stay employed long term.
VAT has a function.
The function of a system is what it does in the standard case, under normal operating conditions. As a flat tax on consumption, it is a regressive tax, meaning what it does is it affects poorer people more, because virtually the entirety of their income has to go into consumption. All else being equal, it strongly contributes to the current situation where most of them will never be able to save enough money to become not-poor. This is what the graph linked to earlier shows: The higher your income, the less you care about VAT. Thus, if you want to slow down the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, reducing VAT (at the very least for staple foods, for which there is already a separate tax rate that you just have to lower to 0%) is the fastest way to do so within the bounds of tax&levy policy.
Are you pleading for it to be lowered for everybody?
Yes. If you really don't want higher income people to profit from this at all, increase the income tax rate for the highest 5% by just enough to compensate for it, which currenly is very roughly somewhere around 130k EUR gross per year.
And your point 3 is already in what I said “They should get rid of the income tax and just have a wealth tax.”
I'm saying: In Germany, reducing the income tax (the lower brackets, specifically) comes in (a very distant) third place among the things one should do to alleviate most people when it comes to taxation & levies. If you just reduce income tax, you don't affect poor people much at all, because most of them already pay little to no income tax.
Are the measures you’re suggesting in addition to what I said or place of it?
"In place" of the reductions, and only for Germany, because that's what the linked statistics shows for it:
Poorest people are most affected by VAT (darkest grey)
From there, until around the top 10-20%** of earners social contributions are the main burden (bright turquiose + desaturated bright turquiose)
Only for the highest 10-20%** is the income tax the highest burden (dark turquiose)
A different illustration for the same data is here, where vat = blue, social contributions = grey (dark+light), and income = red.
Personal note: This is imho why right-wing parties in Germany are always talking about reducing income tax. Because they know it sells well to the electorate while doing the least for most of them.
** Rougly eyeballed from the illustration, don't quote me on the numbers.
That would be you, because you keep being wrong with virtually every single line. Here's how it goes with pseudosignatures:
You make an account with Valve. Valve has previously received the appropriate certificate to perform age verification from the state, so Valve does not communicate with the state now: They present their certificate to the hardware chip in YOUR ePerso, which then creates a pseudonymous signature to send back to Valve that digitally proves the legal age of whoever the ePerso belongs to (and nothing more).
But go ahead and keep licking that technofascist boot.
No thanks, but you go right ahead - someone entrenched in blind ideology is for sure not an ideal mark.
Have you even bothered to do any research at all into what pseudosignatures are and how they can be used? Or are you just trolling?
Valve could simply set up an instance of an eID server software and get a digital certificate for it authorized by our respective national PKI chain. Functionally the same to how TLS certificate chains work. There is zero technical need for any information to flow between Valve and any other party - the state or otherwise - about who is being age verified. And Valve would not be able to get any information about you other than what I've already explained.
Seriously, the brainrot on here seems to be as bad as on Reddit. And btw: This has been state-of-the-art for more than ten years.
I agree that social hierarchies are a feature of homo sapiens, hence why any good form of governance should be based on restricting our worst instincts. That's what the original liberalism improved with the separation of political power into executive, legislative, and judicate branches. Unfortunately, the same was not done for economic power, which - most liberal democracies - allowed to keep concentrating with few to no safeguards.
The eID of the ePerso supports pseudosignatures, which allows the seller to only get to know "This ePerso belongs to someone of legal age who also knows its PIN" and the state to only know "someone I [the state] authorized to perform age verification did so". That is privacy-preserving by any reasonable measure.
It's true they weren't responsible for the situation they found themselves in, that's on the Berlin CDU - my wishes for whom might get me banned here.
However, as I noted, it's not just that they sold the units, it's the combination of that with doing nothing to combat the foreseeable rent increases.
All three options would have at least contributed to mitigating the situation and were achievable without straining the state budget - especially the second one might've even been a net contributor if handled smartly. They did none of them - and it's not like this is a case of hindsight 20/20, this was all known at the time.
As a leftist: The youngest people don't recall that is was the Berlin-"PDS/Linke" going all-in on neoliberal privatization with Wowereit's Berlin-SPD from 2002-2011. They sold off the biggest chunk of state-owned housing, slashed funding for building replacement units, and made zero effort to mitigate the obviously following rising rents via new housing until it was much too late.
I'm willing to extend the federal Linke a line of trust, since they haven't been in a government coalition, yet. The Berlin-Linke, however, I cannot trust to actually stand behind left policies - they have done too much of the exact opposite in the past.
Very roughly: Money taken out of your salary, which goes into health insurance, pension insurance, nursing care insurance, and unemployment insurance, as well as some other minor specialized levies like U1 (to fund part of your income in sickness), U2 (to fund part of your income in motherhood), and U3 (to fund part of your income in case your employer goes insolvent). For most people, they are typically all mandatory.
About half of the first three plus U1, U2, and U3 are taken out of your "total" salary as the employer sees it (they are part of the total cost of your labor). The rest is taken out of the "gross" amount you see on your salary statement (the cost you agreed to in your work contract)*. That's why there are two differently shaded turquiose areas in the graph.
The full details are more complicated.
* Most people here in Germany don't even know about these additional levies, as they don't show up on your income statement. Same as the half subtracted before the gross ("before taxes") number you see on it; plenty of people still think "the employer pays the other half of my social contributions", which is only correct if you don't consider the total mandatory cost of your labor your salary - which imho is asinine, because that's the value your labor must exceed in order to stay employed long term.
The function of a system is what it does in the standard case, under normal operating conditions. As a flat tax on consumption, it is a regressive tax, meaning what it does is it affects poorer people more, because virtually the entirety of their income has to go into consumption. All else being equal, it strongly contributes to the current situation where most of them will never be able to save enough money to become not-poor. This is what the graph linked to earlier shows: The higher your income, the less you care about VAT. Thus, if you want to slow down the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, reducing VAT (at the very least for staple foods, for which there is already a separate tax rate that you just have to lower to 0%) is the fastest way to do so within the bounds of tax&levy policy.
Yes. If you really don't want higher income people to profit from this at all, increase the income tax rate for the highest 5% by just enough to compensate for it, which currenly is very roughly somewhere around 130k EUR gross per year.
I'm saying: In Germany, reducing the income tax (the lower brackets, specifically) comes in (a very distant) third place among the things one should do to alleviate most people when it comes to taxation & levies. If you just reduce income tax, you don't affect poor people much at all, because most of them already pay little to no income tax.
"In place" of the reductions, and only for Germany, because that's what the linked statistics shows for it:
A different illustration for the same data is here, where vat = blue, social contributions = grey (dark+light), and income = red.
Personal note: This is imho why right-wing parties in Germany are always talking about reducing income tax. Because they know it sells well to the electorate while doing the least for most of them.
** Rougly eyeballed from the illustration, don't quote me on the numbers.
The data is very clear. See in particular in terms of how people need to be relieved:
In that order. Note that lower social contributions can (and should) just be balanced via the federal budget.
But since people vote for parties that will never do this and all but ignore parties that would, people will continue to get screwed.
That would be you, because you keep being wrong with virtually every single line. Here's how it goes with pseudosignatures:
You make an account with Valve. Valve has previously received the appropriate certificate to perform age verification from the state, so Valve does not communicate with the state now: They present their certificate to the hardware chip in YOUR ePerso, which then creates a pseudonymous signature to send back to Valve that digitally proves the legal age of whoever the ePerso belongs to (and nothing more).
No thanks, but you go right ahead - someone entrenched in blind ideology is for sure not an ideal mark.
Have you even bothered to do any research at all into what pseudosignatures are and how they can be used? Or are you just trolling?
Valve could simply set up an instance of an eID server software and get a digital certificate for it authorized by our respective national PKI chain. Functionally the same to how TLS certificate chains work. There is zero technical need for any information to flow between Valve and any other party - the state or otherwise - about who is being age verified. And Valve would not be able to get any information about you other than what I've already explained.
Seriously, the brainrot on here seems to be as bad as on Reddit. And btw: This has been state-of-the-art for more than ten years.
I agree that social hierarchies are a feature of homo sapiens, hence why any good form of governance should be based on restricting our worst instincts. That's what the original liberalism improved with the separation of political power into executive, legislative, and judicate branches. Unfortunately, the same was not done for economic power, which - most liberal democracies - allowed to keep concentrating with few to no safeguards.
The eID of the ePerso supports pseudosignatures, which allows the seller to only get to know "This ePerso belongs to someone of legal age who also knows its PIN" and the state to only know "someone I [the state] authorized to perform age verification did so". That is privacy-preserving by any reasonable measure.
They're not. The seller just has to verify customer age, same as when e.g. buying alcohol in the supermarket or entering a gambling hall.
Valve has simply been refusing to do so, even though eID makes privacy-preserving age verification trivial, frankly.