German Government Increases Welfare Benefits So Much That For Many, It’s Not Worth Working

Dr. Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the anti-Muslim-migrant party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), recently said that “Germany is run by idiots.” She bewails the fact that since 1972, there have been more deaths in Germany than births of indigenous Germans, and that admitting unskilled and uneducable migrants to “make up the difference” is no solution. Germany needs skilled workers, able to easily integrate into German society. Muslim migrants fail on both counts.

To prove her point that the country is run by idiots, Germany’s left-wing government has just increased welfare payments that make it more attractive for many low-skilled workers to quit their jobs and live on the dole. And Muslim economic migrants now have even less incentive than they ever did to look for work. More on this latest folly can be found here: “Unemployed migrants and Germans have little incentive to work as left-wing government introduces blitz of welfare increases,” by John Cody, Remix News, September 4, 2023:

Germany’s left-wing government has introduced a blitz of social welfare reforms more and more attractive to the point that it is becoming hardly worth working. The policy has confounded economists and business leaders, who say the government acknowledges there is a lack of workers, but nevertheless provides ample incentives not to work. Instead, it has turned to promoting immigration.

Germany’s native population is both aging, and shrinking . The skilled workers who are retiring and leaving the labor market are not being replaced by unskilled Muslim migrants, who have come not to work but to take advantage of the extensive welfare benefits. The fertility rate of German women, at 1.612, is far below the replacement level. Germany needs to import workers, but which ones? There are unusual costs associated with Muslim migrants — their very high crime rates and low employment rates, and the apparent impossibility of Muslims integrating into the societies of Infidels whom they are taught in the Qur’an to regard as “the most vile of created beings.” Some crazy schemes to increase the number of workers have been bruited about. In 2022 German politicians were discussing a plan to import 250,000 Kenyan workers, a plan later abandoned when the cost of training them to perform high-skilled jobs was judged prohibitive. Now, in an attempt to increase the number of eligible migrants, the government has repealed the requirement that would-be migrants pass a German language test. But at the same time that the government has made it easier for migrants to enter, it has raised welfare benefits to a level that disincentivizes work for those same migrants. They now have even more reason, once they have been admitted into Germany, to rely completely on welfare benefits to sustain them.

A column from Dorothea Siems in Die Welt notes that for many single parents, low-skilled workers and migrants, the labor market has created an absurd situation, with Siems writing: “The state is acting as a caretaker, but it is keeping the recipients dependent instead of helping them to gradually stand on their own two feet.”

The left-wing government has essentially taken the position that in the fight against poverty, there is only one solution: higher cash benefits. In the past few weeks, it has introduced increasingly generous social benefits. On Aug. 28, Lisa Paus, the Green federal minister for family affairs, presented her basic child allowance, which will bring higher cash payments to low-income parents. One day later, Labor Minister Hubertus Heil announced a 12 percent increase in the citizen’s [guaranteed] income.

With the drastic increase in the citizen’s income, the coalition is actually increasing the problem. The increase is far above the inflation adjustment. Basic income support is pulling ahead of wages. CDU parliamentary group vice-chairman Jens Spahn is therefore right when he speaks of a wrong signal to millions of working people. Already now, a household of four [living on welfare benefits] receives as much from the citizen’s [guaranteed] income plus housing costs as an average-income family has at its disposal,” writes Siems.

At the same time, several education studies published in recent weeks have demonstrated a dramatic decline in Germany’s schools. The main sufferers are children from poorer households. One of the main problems facing school districts is the dramatic increase in foreigners, many of whom lack a command of the German language. Ethnic Germans are being displaced in most schools across the country, and in many districts, German school-age children are not only the minority, but in some cases, also completely gone.

When in a German classroom a large number of students do not even know the language of instruction, much time and effort must be devoted to training those students in the rudiments of German. This takes away from the time that should be spent on the main subjects of the curriculum — mathematics, science, history, German literature and language at a non-rudimentary level. The foreign students drag down the whole class, and it is the indigenous German pupils, and the overworked and harried teachers, sometimes threatened physically by their Muslim students who often disrupt classes, who must endure this catastrophic decline in standards.

Alarm bells are ringing over the government’s agenda, which has overseen a steady decrease in educational standards while also overseeing the deindustrialization of Germany. The government’s claims that immigrants will help fill in the labor market gaps are being contested by data that shows that half of the over 1 million migrants who arrived in Germany in 2016 still remain jobless, and many who are working now work in low-income areas that leave them eligible for social benefits. The costs are enormous, with Germany planning to spend €36 billion this year alone on housing, education, healthcare and social benefits for Germany’s exploding migrant population.

The migrants who were supposed to “fill in the labor market gaps” haven’t done so. Fully half of the immigrants are still unemployed seven years after arriving in Germany. And of those who are employed, they are mostly doing unskilled work, when what the Germany work force needs is highly skilled labor, or immigrants able to be trained for high-skilled jobs. There are migrants who can meet that need, but Muslims have proven they are not among them. Germany is more likely to find skilled workers, or workers capable of becoming skilled, in such places as Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, where the standard of living is lower than in Germany and workers hoping to improve their economic lot in life could be enticed to move to Germany.

The increase in social benefits is likely to worsen the situation, as the same migrants that the left say will save the job market have even less incentive to work than before, with many of them already choosing the path of unemployment. Germany’s tax burden for companies and individual households is enormous, while inflation further erodes purchasing power….

The German government admits Muslim migrants in order to “fill a labor market shortage” and then lavishes so many welfare benefits on them that they have concluded it is not worth going to work — they can make just as much from those benefits as they can in wages earned at the kind of menial jobs for which they qualify.

The German government should reverse course. It should reimpose the language requirement for migrants that it recently ended. It should also require would-be migrants to demonstrate, through testing, a knowledge and understanding both of European civilization, and of German history. Among the subjects that should be covered are the history of Christianity, the European Enlightenment, and the Holocaust, all subjects that Muslims find most distasteful.

Furthermore, the government is creating the conditions necessary to justify a rapid increase in migration, as those Germans who have a comfortable citizens income lose the incentive to work, thus increasing the incentive to look abroad for workers.

The German government appears to be run by nitwits. Germany is already, with Sweden, the most generous welfare state in the world. Now Chancellor Scholz and his associates have decided to increase welfare benefits still more, so that when the calculation is done, those on welfare, including the Muslim economic migrants who have flooded into Germany since 2015, no longer have any incentive to work: They can make the same amount on welfare as they can receive working at the kind of jobs for which they qualify — that is, menial jobs.

Instead of raising cash payments for migrants on welfare, the German government should be steadily reducing them so as to increase the incentive to work. Let the welfare payments be pegged, for example, at 100 euros a week for the first year a migrant is in Germany, 70 euros a week for the second year, 30 euros a week for the third year, and nothing — no cash payments — after that. At the same time, Muslims should no longer be supplied with free or subsidized housing and be made to pay for medical insurance. Such stern measures will lead the Muslim migrants rather quickly either to accept jobs that they had previously rejected or, which would be even better, they will choose to leave Germany, either to return to their countries of origin, or to find another European country where they might still be admitted and, for what one hopes will be a very short time, supported.