{"id":184581,"date":"2012-03-13T21:25:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-14T02:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/03\/13\/the-krauts-dont-practice-what-they-preach\/"},"modified":"2012-03-13T21:25:00","modified_gmt":"2012-03-14T02:25:00","slug":"the-krauts-dont-practice-what-they-preach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/03\/13\/the-krauts-dont-practice-what-they-preach\/","title":{"rendered":"The Krauts Don&#8217;t Practice What They Preach"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It looks like the Germans are going to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/international\/germany\/0,1518,820828,00.html\">miss their austerity goals this year<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: blue;\"><p>European countries are expected to implement tough austerity measures amid the debt crisis. But Germany isn&#8217;t setting a very good example. SPIEGEL has learned that Berlin failed to reach its own austerity goals in 2011. And despite pressuring its neighbors to save, Germany is behind this year too.<\/p>\n<p>As she travels from one European Union summit to the next, Angela Merkel&#8217;s constant mantra in recent months has been austerity, austerity, austerity. But apparently the German chancellor hasn&#8217;t been quite as strict when it comes to her own country&#8217;s budget.<\/p>\n<p>SPIEGEL reports this week that the German government didn&#8217;t reach even half of its planned savings in the federal budget. Only 42 percent of the spending cuts named by Merkel&#8217;s coalition government, comprised of the conservative Christian Democrats and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party, were actually not implemented.<\/p>\n<p>Calculations made by the influential Cologne Institute for Economic Research indicate that only \u20ac4.7 billion ($6.16 billion) of the \u20ac11.2 billion in austerity measures stipulated by the savings package actually took shape in 2011.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You know, maybe, just maybe, Merkel and allies are a bigger part of the problem than people imagine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It looks like the Germans are going to miss their austerity goals this year: European countries are expected to implement tough austerity measures amid the debt crisis. But Germany isn&#8217;t setting a very good example. SPIEGEL has learned that Berlin failed to reach its own austerity goals in 2011. And despite pressuring its neighbors to &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,984,1051],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-europe","category-hypocrisy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184581"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}