Austerity For Thee …
But not for me.
From a German news site [via Attaturk] and AFP reporting Angela raised her salary and that of her ministers:
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will soon have an extra €930 [$1,189] in her pocket each month, after the country’s cabinet decided on Wednesday to award themselves their first pay rise for over a decade.
Merkel, her ministers and their parliamentary secretaries of state will see their wages rise in three stages between now and August 2013, until they all get 5.7 percent more. It is the first pay raise that the German cabinet has taken in twelve years.
The chancellor’s total pay is set to rise from €16,152 [$20,647] per month before tax to around €17,016 [$21,751]. This does not include her €1,022 [$1,306] “special duties” allowance.
Ministers’ pay will rise by €750 euros [$959 dollars] to around €13,795 [$17,634] a month. This will amount to a bump of around €9,000 [$11,505] over a year.
Until now, ministers’ wages have been set relative to those of civil servants. And despite considerable protest about the idea of separating them, particularly over the past two years, the cabinet decided to go ahead with the change.
[I did the conversions in square brackets]
The German cabinet salaries had been tied to civil service salaries, which means that civil service hasn’t seen a pay raise in over 12 years, and still won’t [have to cut wasteful government spending], but elected politicians need to be paid more to deal with the cost of living [which apparently isn’t important for actual government workers].
So, how is she going to pay for the increased cost of the cabinet salaries? Who gets screwed to balance her personal budget? Why don’t she and her ministers learn to live within their means?
2 comments
Frau Merkel would be the perfect Republican if she were an American — grasping, greedy, hypocritical, and stupid. By stupid, I mean that the policies she’s pushing are *guaranteed* to make Greece, Italy, and Spain eventually default, leading to huge losses for German banks, the same banks firmly in her corner. But ideology for Merkel, as with today’s GOP, trumps reality. Any unpleasant facts that don’t match up with her ideology get discarded like rubbish.
– Badtux the Reality-based Penguin
The bond holders should have cut a deal, or the ECB should have fired up the presses. Destroying the economies of southern Europe isn’t going to be good for anyone.
Faith-based economics really sucks, and usually ends badly. Even voters in Germany have figured that out and are voting for anyone but Angie when an election comes up.
The concept of the Eurozone is coming under a lot of stress and could shatter if things don’t change quickly.