Germans discover that policies favor the rich when government "edits" draft report on poverty

From our Quaint Germany series.

To be honest, almost every post about things German could run under the snarky "Quaint Germany" teaser.

The blogster often relishes comparing the German media to their Irish (Republic of) counterparts. In this view of the world, German public broadcasters are nothing more than an over bloated version of RTE, and the German print/online press a bad copy of the Irish Times plus the inevitably crazy Sun - only a lot less funny and with more very long words.

At some very recent point in German history, aka. a few years ago, the German government decided to do a regular official poverty report. This decision did not come easy to a country that has a hard time even acknowledging that poverty exists within its borders.

Somewhat similar to the introduction of a minimum wage over a decade after every other less hypes EU state had done so.

Good job, Germany!

The first news from the upcoming report have come and gone, like the news that the low wage sector in the country is expanding, or - as the blogster gloated - German taxpayers are subsidizing your Porsche.

Since that early piece of news, some journalists have done their work and found some creative editing of the initial draft. The current version no longer has several long passages about the results of a study that looked into the influence of the rich on policies.

According to this article in Zeit Online, the very explicit findings of the study have been largely removed. Instead of the initial dire warning that policies clearly favor the rich and we can thus talk of a 'crisis of representation', the new version only acknowledges that political change is more likely when favored by a majority of the richer citizens. The new government draft warns that the study has not found hard evidence for why this phenomenon has been observed.

The study is lauded as the first study of the influence of the elites and the wealthy on political decision making, which is somewhat funny because we have a US study published in 2014 that comes to the same conclusions.

There are differences in the political systems, so doing a study for Germany is prudent, but fundamentally different study results would be a huge surprise in light of German economic and social policies over the past generation or so.

After all, the big social and labor law changes under the label of "Agenda 2010" are really nothing more than an adaptation of long standing US provisions with some British style sanctions plus health insurance.

We'll keep an eye on any additional changes of the report before its final publication in early 2017.

Since the German government won't include the good stuff in its report, we'll give you this 2014 Huffingtion Post piece on the US study: “Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all,” the researchers write in the article titled, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.”