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Why do journalists have to do this work as opposed to the German secret service or military?
The military probably knew all along, but are not going to tweet out their intel.
Have you considered that a secret service might be keeping it's service secret?
Why bother when the joirnalism students will do it for you? :)
It could be that the journalists got a tip.
Yeah probably the military is not making this info public.
Because the government that just increased debt by about a trillion needed for investments (which of course aren't spend for their intended purpose) doesn't have any money until we finally dismantle social security.
And so they can sadly do nothing because they don't have the manpower to investigate anthing or enforce any legislation (for complicated reasons I'm too dumb to explain this even includes tax investigators who would bring in ~10 times their cost...).
I mean seriously... it's already so much work to keep all actual issues out of the widely consumed media and constantly invent new populist narratives as a diversion should something slip through. We really can't expect even more hard work from them.
Is there general concsensus that social-security needs to go? Or are you more being sarcastic? It's hard to tell from the outside.
When you say "consensus" do you mean an actual one (as in: the population agreeing) or a manufactured one (as in politicians and the media drowning us in the narrative 24/7)?
Definitely, rightfully bitter and sarcastic.
There is no such sentiment. There are political parties across the spectrum, of course, and it's quite obvious to everyone, including the press and citizens, that the current implementation is not sustainable long-term. But there is no public sentiment or consensus about dismantling it. Honestly, this is the first time I've heard of this ask/claim/argument of dismantling as the goal or necessity.
I was wondering/suspecting they were being sarcastic as well, but I don't know.
No, that's just the neolibaral capitalist propaganda talking. The actual unsustainable part are the less than 1% sucking up most of the money while the remaining fraction is supposed to sustain social, health and pension system from their stagnating wages.
It's actually very easy to look up facts and numbers. The rate between people working and people sustained by them has basically not changed in nearly a century. Sure, children/pensioneer rate changed but that isn't actually a problem as long as the general rate keeps steady. And as long as the workers don't suddenly become much less productive of course.
Funnily the systems worked in the 1950s, in the 1970s, in the 1990s... and then with -as mentioned- roughly the same amount of workers in the total population AND a massively increasing productivity (GDP per capita increased to ~x2,5 in the last 50 years; naturally caused by the exact same progress that also raises life expectancy) it suddenly didn't work anymore and we have to constantly increase the quota of wages workers have to spend on health and social costs. (And the same is true for taxes: how can countries that build infrastructure once fail to even sustain them nowadays?) So what actually changed?
The aswer is quite easy. Up until the 1990s (in Germany... but we see the same bullshit happening in other countries, sometimes a few years earlier, sometimes a bit later) wages and pensions kept in pace with the GDP. And then neoliberalists sold the fairy tale of privatisation and other means of not only funneling money to the top but also stopping to tax that money. And while wages stagnated the whole system was still linked those wages.
Seriously... production per capita is high as never before yet -magically- neither health, social and pension contributions based on those wages nor basic public functions based on taxes are sustainable anymore? If you seriously believe the constant propaganda of how you (or better those indolent youngsters) are just lazy and need to remember how to be productive, how <insert whoever is in the government right now) is just wasting money for nonsense, and -most importantly!- how we only need to get rid of all those lazy immigrants exploiting us, I have this really fancy bridge here that...
Als Anschauungsmaterial:
Wenn du also das nächste mal in einem unbedeutend scheinenden Nebensatz das Wort "Binnennachfrage" hörst, denk einfach mal darüber nach, wieso sich Menschen in einem der reichsten Länder der Welt nichts mehr leisten können, während die Milliardäre im Land ihr Vermögen alle paar Jahre (in Krisenzeit tatsächlich noch schneller) verdoppeln.
That is what I was hoping to hear.