Olaf Scholz is doing little to slow down the debate that his party and the Greens have been initiating about a special tax on the profits of energy companies.
He only had a spokesman say that from the Chancellor's point of view "an excess profit tax is currently not planned".
In other words: the extra tax is lying in the drawer as a bargaining chip within the coalition and as a means of exerting pressure on the FDP finance minister when it comes to raising a lot of money for broad relief in the near future.
Tapping into the supposedly unjustified war profits of individual corporations is likely to be a popular step to increase state revenues in the short term.
However, it would remain a short-sighted act of arbitrary tax policy, which cannot be justified by the crisis.
From now on, companies based in Germany would not only have to cope with the high tax rates, which are already anti-competitive in an international comparison.
In the future, they will also have to ask themselves when they or their industry will be asked to make an extra sacrifice because profits rise so sharply for a few months that politicians become greedy.
Under these circumstances, investors will consider whether their money might not be better spent elsewhere.
At some point, those with close ties to their homeland will have enough, after all, many negative points are piling up in this country: an expensive and perhaps soon unreliable energy supply, weaknesses in the transport and digital network, long approval periods, rigid labor market regulations.
The SPD and the Greens are the ones who advocate permanently higher taxes or debts in the traffic light coalition.
They act as if this were inevitable in view of rising energy prices and high inflation, because new aid would be needed far into “the middle”.
But as long as the labor market is booming and many jobs are vacant, one can assume that the vast majority in such a wealthy country can mobilize enough private reserves, even if they are labor reserves, to not slip below the subsistence level.
Where there is not enough, the state should of course help.
The traffic light should not promise more than that.
Then she should be able to get by with the money.