Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD): During the Corona crisis, he was Finance Minister responsible for the federal budget
Those: Armando Franca/AP/dpa
For a long time it was not clear how expensive the Corona crisis was for taxpayers. Now it is becoming clear what the state aid measures actually cost. A curious item will even occupy the Federal Constitutional Court.
Viel helps a lot, that was the government’s motto from the start in combating the consequences of the pandemic. The then Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (SPD) coined words like “Bazooka” and “Wumms” in 2020 at the beginning of the Corona period. At the time, he promised hundreds of billions of euros from the federal budget for all kinds of aid.
How much the Corona crisis actually cost between 2020 and 2022 can now be seen. The Federal Ministry of Finance has taken stock: the federal government spent 439.7 billion euros in the past three years.
This is shown by a list by the Ministry for the Budget Committee of the Bundestag, which is available at WELT AM SONNTAG. This does not include support payments from the federal states. These are added.
Economic aid for companies, professional sports clubs and cultural events accounted for 66.2 billion euros. The second largest item in the expenditure balance is directly related to the virus: the costs for protective equipment, vaccination and testing add up to 63.5 billion euros.
In third place are budgetary burdens from the Second Corona Tax Assistance Act in the amount of 27.9 billion euros. The law passed in the summer of 2020 bundled all kinds of simplifications, including the reduction in VAT and the child bonus.
A large item in the Ministry of Finance’s list is also the subsidy to the Employment Agency, with which the federal government contributed to the costs of the simplified short-time work regulation, which was used millions of times during the Corona period.
Over a period of three years, this aid amounted to a total of 24.2 billion euros. Compensation payments for bed capacities provided in hospitals are included in the list at 18.5 billion euros.
Included in the total of 439.7 billion euros are not only expenditures for the direct support of citizens, companies and the health sector. Allocations to the Climate and Transformation Fund (KTF) also appear in the calculation. With the fund, the federal government promotes climate protection and the modernization of the state in general. After 26.2 billion euros in 2020, another 60 billion euros were shifted to the KTF in 2021.
From the ministry’s point of view, the classification as a corona measure is consistent. At the beginning of the legislative period at the end of 2021, the traffic light government argued that the additional KTF funds were needed for urgently needed investments that failed during the pandemic.
The CDU/CSU parliamentary group considered the reallocation of the unused emergency loans from Corona to climate to be unconstitutional and sued in Karlsruhe. The hearing before the Federal Constitutional Court is scheduled for June 21.
During the Corona period, however, not only money flowed out of the federal budget. A small part came back. After emergency aid of 14.1 billion euros was paid out to small companies and the self-employed in the first phase of the 2020 pandemic, largely unchecked, 1.4 billion euros went back to the federal government in the two following years thanks to subsequent controls.
