{"id":117091,"date":"2025-10-12T09:15:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T09:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/117091\/"},"modified":"2025-10-12T09:15:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T09:15:12","slug":"germanys-e1-3-trillion-burden-is-becoming-battleground-for-merz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/117091\/","title":{"rendered":"Germany\u2019s \u20ac1.3 Trillion Burden Is Becoming Battleground for Merz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ArticleBodyText_articleBodyContent__17wqE typography_articleBody__3UcBa\" data-component=\"paragraph\">Germany\u2019s soul-searching over how to revive its moribund economy is running into a hard truth: a sprawling welfare state is part of the problem.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleBodyText_articleBodyContent__17wqE typography_articleBody__3UcBa\" data-component=\"paragraph\">After loosening the country\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2025-03-21\/germany-s-landmark-spending-bill-wins-final-lawmaker-approval\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" class=\"media-ui-Link_link-tVkXhPLPofs-\" data-component=\"link\">constitutional debt brake<\/a> and embarking on massive rearmament, the question of how to tackle relentlessly increasing social spending, with its associated burden on employers, is becoming the next bone of contention for Chancellor Friedrich Merz\u2019s coalition. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Germany\u2019s soul-searching over how to revive its moribund economy is running into a hard truth: a sprawling welfare&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[25123,79,6046,2784,184,179,18,43771,6621,3428,19,17,6045,188,790,71823,1078,11388,13640],"class_list":{"0":"post-117091","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-berlin","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-debt","11":"tag-economic-growth","12":"tag-economics","13":"tag-economy","14":"tag-eire","15":"tag-equality","16":"tag-germany","17":"tag-government","18":"tag-ie","19":"tag-ireland","20":"tag-labor","21":"tag-markets","22":"tag-politics","23":"tag-social-democratic-party-of-germany","24":"tag-social-security","25":"tag-taxes","26":"tag-unemployment-benefits"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}