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Five percent less gross domestic product, a deficit of 158 billion euros in the state coffers: The year 2020 is also a historic one because of its economic figures.

It also marks a positive record: The share of employee wages in national income in Germany reached 73.4 percent, the highest level since reunification.

This share is called the wage quota and played a central role in the debates on justice and distribution in the old West German Federal Republic.

Leading social democrats, from Helmut Schmidt onwards, saw in it a yardstick for the social situation: In his first government declaration in 1974, Schmidt described the increase in the wage share to 70 percent measured in the Brandt years as a “great success of distributive justice”.

Source: WORLD infographic

Such jubilation is not to be expected from Olaf Scholz or Saskia Esken: Even and especially the social democracy in Germany has fallen so much in love with the narrative that everything is only becoming more unequal and unjust that an undisguised view of realities is no longer provided is.

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Particularly with regard to the wage share, there was also the fact that the struggle was viewed as hopeless even by SPD leftists like Heiner Flassbeck.

The French economist Thomas Piketty declared its decline years ago as a capitalist law of nature, and economically liberal institutions such as the International Monetary Fund did not want to evade the plausible arguments.

Germany has been a striking, if largely overlooked, counterexample for years.

In the past year, and that is of course correct, it was the Corona crisis that played the decisive role: The recession primarily resulted in deep red balance sheets for companies and the tax authorities.

In the workforce on the other hand, there were also many who suffered.

All in all, however, she got off relatively lightly: While corporate and property incomes fell by 7.5 percent, employee wages fell by 0.5 percent.

The burden-sharing between capital and labor, in other words, was conceivably social.

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And, more importantly, in 2020 only continued what had already been created during the upswing.

In six of the previous eight years, thanks to the enormous employment boom, employee wages had risen faster than corporate and property incomes.

SPD calls that right now it is urgent to make the rich poorer through fiscal access in order to finally create "time for justice": They already looked strangely out of time during the 2017 election campaign.

Four years later, that only applies more.

You just have to want to look.