Not at all.
It's a basic fact that, when the government pays X many millions or billions in wages to people for doing stuff it wants done, its bottom line doesn't worsen by X millions/billions but by a considerably smaller figure - because it collects taxes and SS from those same wages. This doesn't go into any secondary effects.
And the people hired to erect the new housing units, hired to teach the language courses, and hired to go into the migrant centers and explain that it's un-German to beat up the minority migrants or whatever the other integration measures are, are recruited from Germany's reserve army of the unemployed, are they? Absent the immigration crisis, most of those employees would have had other jobs, done other useful work which now won't get done, and paid Y millions/billions in taxes anyway. It's the essence of the broken window fallacy to add up only what happens and neglect to also subtract what would have happened instead.
Some of them would have been unemployed, yes
No doubt, but "some" isn't enough to make your case. To support your claim of "a considerably smaller figure", you need a considerable fraction of them to have been unemployed.
- unemployment in Germany has fallen from around 5% in 2014 to just under 4% in 2017. Some maybe would have been employed and paying taxes - but to the Romanian, Serbian or Polish state, not the German one. Have you been to a German construction site recently?
Great, so that will just mean even more need for social spending to erect even more housing units and teach even more language courses and do even more integration measures, this time for Romanian, Serbian and Polish immigrants. What you're describing isn't cost-saving; it's a Ponzi scheme.
Some of them would have been employed in Germany, but in less well paid jobs with a much lower tax obligation - which is why they were ready to switch.
Maybe, if that's why they switched; or maybe they just liked the work better; or maybe their old jobs were going away because spending on migrants squeezed out spending on what they were doing before. If you claim they switched because they got a raise, show some data to that effect.
You too seem to misapprehend the scale of things: the figure angelo presented and which we now know to be an exaggerated estimate amounts to about 1% of the German state's budget.
Huh? Where did you get that? You certainly didn't get it from anything I wrote. You probably decided I was misapprehending the scale because you inferred that since I was pointing out you were wrong it must mean I was saying angelo was right. Nothing of the sort -- he's pulling quantitative claims out of his ass, as usual. But when you say the cost to the German state is considerably less than the nominal cost, that's you pulling a quantitative claim out of your ass too.
Assuming that about 40% of Germany's workforce are directly or indirectly paid by the state and its subsidiaries, this is very roughly 0.4% of the German workforce. By no stretch is this a serious strain on other sectors, and indeed within what the "reserve army of the unemployed" can supply.
It's not an issue of whether the number of hirees is less than the number of unemployed. What the government is buying to deal with the migrants is
skilled labor. The German economy is in good shape compared to most of the EU; most unemployed people in Germany aren't unemployed because of low demand for skilled labor; they're unemployed because they don't have the currently in-demand skills, or they have other problems making it hard for them to hold down jobs.
An addendum: The question we're discussing, in response to angelo's claim that Germans will have to pay "much higher taxes", isn't whether it's a net good to German society but exclusively how it effects the bottom line of Germany's public spenders.
Well, when you put it that way, I guess it means you win automatically, sort of. It won't affect the bottom line of Germany's public spenders regardless of how much they spend on migrants, and regardless of how much of that spending they recoup, because
nothing* affects the bottom line of Germany's public spenders, because
they're Germans. They have a cultural predisposition to balance the budget, and to prioritize that over other considerations. But it also means your argument about increased tax revenue is wrong, and that evaluating the cost to the German state by looking at the bottom line completely misses the point. When a new social problem necessitates new social spending, Germany doesn't react like a normal country by running deficits; it reacts by cutting other social spending in order to keep the budget balanced. The cost to the German state of the migrant crisis isn't felt in the bottom line; it's felt in the other social programs that consequently get short-changed. Case in point: by now there are 420,000 homeless Germans, a number that's ballooning at the same time public spending on affordable housing for Germans is getting slashed. (Source: Deutsche Welle)
(* And yes, that's hyperbole; but not by much -- their current surplus and their recent deficits are tiny compared to the deficits of other countries.)
