Word: holznagel
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...acronym, DIW). East Germany today has a number of promising industries and state-of-the-art roads and railways, but it also has superfluous airports, oversized water-treatment plants and a collection of heavily subsidized industrial white elephants, all built at the taxpayers' expense. "Floodlit sheep meadows," grumbles Reiner Holznagel, managing director of the German Federation of Taxpayers. "In every district you can find projects that make you shake your head." Among the most egregious: the now-bankrupt firm Cargolifter, which tried to build a modern Zeppelin airship with tens of millions of government dollars. (See pictures...
...industry through subsidies work so well. While Dresden has managed to reinvent itself as a micro-electronics "cluster," a similar attempt by the town of Frankfurt an der Oder failed. Around eastern Germany, there are numerous examples of industries without real prospects being kept alive artificially, complains Holznagel of the Taxpayers' Federation, citing tilemaking and leather-treatment plants on the Baltic coast. "The subsidies just prolong the death," he says, "but it comes anyway...
German skepticism about the utility of big government-spending programs endures, bolstering Merkel's determination to resist international pressure to take more decisive action to counter the economic crisis. Among those arguing forcefully against any new stimulus packages is the Taxpayers' Federation. Holznagel says that in the early 1990s his organization kept to itself doubts about the big spending on reunification - it was politically foolish to do otherwise. But now, he says, "the situation is completely different. The danger is always that money is spent neither appropriately nor efficiently...
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