In Germany the executive/gubernative has permission to deviate by 20% from the budget given by the legislative by shifting money and they have permission to not spend money altogether unless there's some juristic/natural person entitled to it.
The German minister of defence, for example, could as far as I know stop all 'his' new procurement with a simple sheet of paper and some ink within minutes as far as I know.
So we could basically balance our budget (about a tenth not paid for by revenues) today if we wanted to. It only takes eradication of thousands of small pet projects* and few big ticket projects.
Instead, our government has just decided that having more revenues means you can spend more and increased the planned budget deficit. Part of this increase is due to one-time expenditures that shall make it easier to stay within the new constitutional limits for the budget once they're in force. Another part is due to new nonsense such as paying parents for not sending their child to a Kindergarten.
With Adenauer as chancellor we had a foreign policy grand strategy that mastered what failed during the 20's.
With Ludwig Erhard as his minister of the economy we had an economic and fiscal grand strategy rivalling the grand strategies of von Bismarck.
Later (and shortly) with Brandt as chancellor we had a reform movement towards more democracy and more liberties in the society.
Ever since, our governments were quite crappy:
70's: Schmidt government fails to react properly and forcefully to the structural economic changes and both oil crisis. Unemployment and public debt grow.
80's: Little progress if any in politics. Kohl's chancellorship survives well into the 90's only because of the reunification. Introduction of Deutsche Mark in East Germany with a wrong exchange rate destroys East German industry's liquidity and thus even many potentially profitable businesses.
Early and Mid-90's: A tired Kohl preserves power, mismanages the economic development of East Germany.
Late 90's: A supposedly social-democrat-green yuppie-mentality government partially dismantles the welfare state to boost 'competitiveness' (a common fearmongering of the industry lobbies at the time) and yields a terrible trade balance deficit (for the competitiveness was OK, and was raised to unhealthy). The supposed pacifists of the green party went to war asap ('99). Some other nonsensical reform such as subsidies for private retirement plans were enacted as well (made zero sense macroeconomically).
2000's: Merkel as chancellor has mastered politics (especially the destruction of party-internal opposition) and displays an increasingly astonishing ability to throw 'conservative' key political positions overboard at will.
It's so totally no surprise that the political Germany of our time is not capable of doing much right in this economic and European crisis.
*: Best medium-term savings measure is to fire ministerial bureaucrats. I've learned at work that even low-level ministerial bureaucrats are causing excessive costs with pet projects. A bureaucrat known to me (ranking so low that he really only had one guy as subordinate) had a 60 million Euro pet project (spread over six years) that was about 40-70% waste of money. His retirement couldn't possibly be more expensive than keeping him on the job.
Less bureaucrats in ministries = less advocates for new pet "pilot" projects and wasteful spending in general. A 1/3 personnel cut in all ministries would be a wise move. At the same time, outsourcing of ministry tasks (from kitchen to program offices) should be reduced by 1/3 as well.
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