Though, to be fair, they should really blame the electorate. The politicians have simply been doing what they and their parties were voted in for.

if someone is unhappy with the German rail network, they could just drive too.

Can’t speak for everyone, but at least for me: And pay the considerable high upfront cost for the license, car itself, insurance, parking, etc.?

I complain about the rail in Germany a lot, because I see how much better it could and should be, given our economic capabilities. Not because I think cars are better. The only thing I can imagine pushing me to willingly go through all the financial and temporal hassle of cars would be moving out into the countryside.

It’s frankly hilarious that the author specifically calls out everyone but Green voters as the problem and in the next sentence identifies Schröder as the root (the infection vector in Germany for neoliberal shitfuckery was actually Kohl, but close enough):

Ultimately any German who has ever voted for any party other than the Grüne also deserves what they get. The Third Way / Die neue Mitte of Gerhard Schröder from the late 1990s is at the root of all of this […]

Who, again, were the coalition partners of Schröder’s SPD and whose voters are thus just as responsible for Germany’s catrastrophic neoliberal course? Toot, toot, it’s the Greens.

The only major party we can (as of yet) count on the make-things-better-for-normal-people side of this is Die Linke; as usual, unfortunately, 'cause they have their own issues.

Sure! But it’s not particularly sophisticated. Other than staple recipes (like e.g. vegetables stews) I learned while growing up, when there’s a product I was previously dependent on buying ready-made that gets enshittified by the food industry so much I’m unwilling to pay the full asking price, I start looking into the recipe for it and experiment to calibrate quality, time efficiency, and material cost to the exact tradeoff I consider best for me. Frozen pizza vs self made pizza being one example.

My joy in cooking, aside from the above optimization process I find fun, comes from knowning I pay less money to eat a better quality (and almost always less unhealthy) meal than I’d otherwise be able to. Once I have a recipe dialed in, it also requires virtually no thinking to get done, which is the opposite of my daily work; that’s the “unwinding” for me. I can then also combine it with listening to some audiobook or TTRPG actual play / podcast.

Due to this depth-first approach my actual list of recipes isn’t incredibly large, but it’s enough to never get boring by now, at least.

Off-what? You mean in meatspace?

Jokes aside: Reading. Designing and playing Pen&Paper RPGs. Cooking.

Well, I’m assuming the comically timed cold and hot water events aren’t actually part of the curse, but the Manga/Anime format. So, technically not at will; but so far I’ve had virtually 100% control over when I’m submerged in enough water, so that’s why “essentially”.

Ranma 1/2. Being able to switch between male and female body essentially at will would be great.

If you want to do the least amount of tech support: Fedora Kinoite.

What did you expect people to say? Here in Germany, at least, this lines up with what any reasonable person would expect from our government parties. It’s not like people didn’t know what they were voting for.

but maybe define “social contributions”

Very roughly: Money taken out of your salary, which goes into health insurance, pension insurance, nursing care insurance, and unemployment insurance, as well as some other minor specialized levies like U1 (to fund part of your income in sickness), U2 (to fund part of your income in motherhood), and U3 (to fund part of your income in case your employer goes insolvent). For most people, they are typically all mandatory.

About half of the first three plus U1, U2, and U3 are taken out of your “total” salary as the employer sees it (they are part of the total cost of your labor). The rest is taken out of the “gross” amount you see on your salary statement (the cost you agreed to in your work contract)*. That’s why there are two differently shaded turquiose areas in the graph.

The full details are more complicated.

* Most people here in Germany don’t even know about these additional levies, as they don’t show up on your income statement. Same as the half subtracted before the gross (“before taxes”) number you see on it; plenty of people still think “the employer pays the other half of my social contributions”, which is only correct if you don’t consider the total mandatory cost of your labor your salary - which imho is asinine, because that’s the value your labor must exceed in order to stay employed long term.

VAT has a function.

The function of a system is what it does in the standard case, under normal operating conditions. As a flat tax on consumption, it is a regressive tax, meaning what it does is it affects poorer people more, because virtually the entirety of their income has to go into consumption. All else being equal, it strongly contributes to the current situation where most of them will never be able to save enough money to become not-poor. This is what the graph linked to earlier shows: The higher your income, the less you care about VAT. Thus, if you want to slow down the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, reducing VAT (at the very least for staple foods, for which there is already a separate tax rate that you just have to lower to 0%) is the fastest way to do so within the bounds of tax&levy policy.

Are you pleading for it to be lowered for everybody?

Yes. If you really don’t want higher income people to profit from this at all, increase the income tax rate for the highest 5% by just enough to compensate for it, which currenly is very roughly somewhere around 130k EUR gross per year.

And your point 3 is already in what I said “They should get rid of the income tax and just have a wealth tax.”

I’m saying: In Germany, reducing the income tax (the lower brackets, specifically) comes in (a very distant) third place among the things one should do to alleviate most people when it comes to taxation & levies. If you just reduce income tax, you don’t affect poor people much at all, because most of them already pay little to no income tax.

Are the measures you’re suggesting in addition to what I said or place of it?

“In place” of the reductions, and only for Germany, because that’s what the linked statistics shows for it:

• Poorest people are most affected by VAT (darkest grey)
• From there, until around the top 10-20%** of earners social contributions are the main burden (bright turquiose + desaturated bright turquiose)
• Only for the highest 10-20%** is the income tax the highest burden (dark turquiose)

A different illustration for the same data is here, where vat = blue, social contributions = grey (dark+light), and income = red.

Personal note: This is imho why right-wing parties in Germany are always talking about reducing income tax. Because they know it sells well to the electorate while doing the least for most of them.

** Rougly eyeballed from the illustration, don’t quote me on the numbers.

The data is very clear. See in particular in terms of how people need to be relieved:

1. Lower the value added tax, 0% for staple foods.
2. Lower social contributions.
3. Lower the income tax.

In that order. Note that lower social contributions can (and should) just be balanced via the federal budget.

But since people vote for parties that will never do this and all but ignore parties that would, people will continue to get screwed.