Berlin.- The German Family Minister, the green Lisa Paus, He came out this Friday in defense of the new benefit for children in poverty, whose budget has caused disagreements within the government coalition of social democrats, greens and liberals.
“It is an investment in the future of our children and in our well-being,” stated in a brief appearance in Berlin, in which he did not want to mention figures on the cost of the measure, since these they are negotiating “internally”.
Cost disputes with the Ministry of Finance, in the hands of the liberal Christian Lindner, led Paus to unexpectedly veto last Wednesday his plan to provide tax relief to businesses amid Germany’s technical recession.
The so-called “basic child protection” It intends to merge various benefits and offer a minimum income to the families of the 5.5 million German children who live in poverty or are at risk of poverty, Paus reiterated today.
The Family Ministry has completed this Friday the corresponding draft that must now be studied by the rest of the Government, said the green policy, which insisted that its plan conforms to the objectives stated by Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
According to the public channel “ZDF”, the Family Ministry had initially budgeted 12,000 million euros for the measure, but later reduced the amount to 7,000 million per year, while the budgets calculated by Linder for 2025 do not foresee more than 2,000 million euros for the provision.
Paus’s veto of the Finance Minister’s plan to offer 6,000 million euros in tax relief to companies, which had already received the go-ahead from the rest of the green members of the Government, has caused outrage among the Liberals, who have described it as “blackmail”.
This is not the first disagreement between the two minor partners of the government coalition and only a few months ago the Liberals demolished the project of the Minister of Economy and Climate Protection, the green Robert Habeck, to install climate neutral heating.
It is estimated that one in five German children lives in poverty or at risk of poverty.
A report presented today by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) warned that the social costs of this problem in Germany, in areas such as health, amount to more than 100,000 million euros annually.
For this reason, the organization spoke out in favor of the introduction of the “basic child safeguard” to break the cycle of poverty that is often transmitted from generation to generation, according to the president of the DIW, Marcel Fratzscher.
