Now it's getting serious.

This Monday, the "main negotiating group" of the alleged coalition partners of the SPD, Greens and FDP, 21 people, seven from each party, will meet for the first time.

The venue is the Hamburg state representation, the former territory of the designated Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The traffic light government, which is in the process of being founded, will soon have to announce what it now wants to spend money on - and what not.

Finally, the parties also have to decide on the coalition agreement before the previous finance minister, Scholz, is to be elected chancellor in St.

Ralph Bollmann

Correspondent for economic policy and deputy head of economics and “Money & More” for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

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The results of the 22 specialist working groups have been with the General Secretaries since last Wednesday evening.

Apart from them, nobody has a complete overview of all subject areas, the matter is top secret - "trustworthy", says Scholz on every question about details.

Much of what is written in the papers has not yet been agreed.

Things that only one party endorses are highlighted in their respective colors.

What one of the three parties rejects, however, is crossed out in its color.

It's almost a bit like the disarmament negotiations of the 1980s or the Brussels summit on the euro crisis in the early 2010s.

The FDP relies on private investments

The estimates diverge a little on how much money the spending requests add up to. Almost every working group has formulated favorite expensive projects. For example, the future government partners want to transform the current Hartz IV into a basic security, which sounds like more change than it means in practice - but is not available for free, even if that is exactly what shouldn't be too noticeable.

The experts also want to spend more money on health and care, and even the cultural politicians are taking their toll, albeit not a very high one. People who are familiar with the subject estimate the bill for the wish list to be around 50 billion euros - not once, but per year, of course. That would be a little over or a little under ten percent of the federal budget, depending on whether one takes the volume of the pre-crisis years as a yardstick or the budget inflated due to the pandemic these days.

The Greens had asked for this sum in advance solely for additional investments, with a focus on climate protection: "This is how the ecological-social transformation succeeds", it said in their election manifesto. It won't be that much, at least not from the federal budget. The FDP thinks that a lot of this should be done by private individuals, something that Social Democrat Scholz had always emphasized in the election campaign. In the FAS guest article, economics professors Lars P. Feld, Veronika Grimm and Volker Wieland demanded that the financial requirements should be “checked with regard to the time period and the division between the state and the corporate sector”

.

Encouraging such cash flows, if necessary with extended depreciation options, is of course not entirely free for the state either.

However, the public sector has not been able to keep up with spending money, quite apart from the question of whether citizens find more construction sites really so sexy in the end.