Lower Saxony’s CDU leader Bernd Althusmann is demanding that the tax authorities should temporarily repay advance payments made to companies with a high proportion of energy costs. The debt brake should also be temporarily suspended during the energy crisis. Otherwise, the middle class would die quietly, so Althusmann.
The increased energy costs not only burden millions of private individuals. Companies are also groaning under the exploding prices. Now Lower Saxony’s CDU boss Bernd Althusmann is making a new proposal on how companies can be helped: In an interview with “Business Insider” he calls for “immediate liquidity support for companies” in view of an impending recession. His proposal: On the one hand, the deferral of all advance payments on income, corporation, trade and sales tax, and that automatically without an application. On the other hand, companies that have recorded a high proportion of energy costs or a sharp drop in sales should also be given the opportunity for the tax authorities to repay advance payments made for the second and third quarters upon request.
Althusmann, who is his party’s top candidate in the upcoming state elections, continued that the deferral should be limited in time. For the time being, the deferral should include all advance payments for the period from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the second quarter of 2023. In order to make the deferral possible, the CDU politician believes that the debt brake must also be temporarily overridden if necessary. However, such a decision always remains the ultima ratio. “In the end, debt always means further heating up of inflation and that cannot be in the interest of the German economy,” he says.
“If we do nothing, then the alternative is that exactly what we don’t want will happen, namely a quiet death of the middle class,” Althusmann continues. What remains decisive is that if Germany were to be deprived of its economic basis, according to Althusmann, the country would be in such a severe recession within the next few months that Germany would no longer be able to help other countries, such as Ukraine. Althusmann: “The situation is getting worse from week to week. We now have to help the companies to prevent the super meltdown.”
