The social benefit of debt counseling is undoubted. Those seeking advice are empowered to claim their consumer rights and (regain) their quality of life. Existential emergencies can be avoided and ...significant savings can be made for the national budget. It also benefits creditors financially by avoiding private insolvency. In order to strengthen debt counselors, clear and immediate political action is required. One step should be the introduction of a legal right to debt counselling and the expansion of counseling capacities. Both could be financed through fair creditor participation and would be accompanied by a nationwide initiative to train new debt counselors.
The new Federal Fiscal Equalization System became effective on 1 January, 2020. While all public budgets in the federal system of Germany were faced with high decreases in revenues caused by the ...measures to fight the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a first evaluation shows that the differences to the old system are rather marginal. The focus now lies on the vertical distribution of the value-added tax, whereas for the fiscal capacity equalisation only revenue of the Laender are used as before. In fact, the supplementary federal grants, the federal grants for special needs and very critical new federal grants are still problematic and a strong signal for centralisation. JEL Classification: H24, H22, D31. Bereits 2015 wurde erstmalig durch die Konferenz der Ministerprasident:innen ein neues Finanzausgleichssystem ab 2020 diskutiert und beschlossen. Seitdem sind zahlreiche Beitrage zu den moglichen fiskalischen Auswirkungen, Anreizproblematiken und Bewertungen einiger Detailregelungen entstanden und debattiert worden. Nach der ersten Durchfuhrung im Ausgleichsjahr 2020 ist es nun Zeit, erstmalig auf konkrete Ergebnisse einzugehen und dabei verbliebene und neue Probleme offen zu diskutieren.
In his On the Glory of Athens, Plutarch complained that the Athenian people spent more on the production of dramatic festivals and "the misfortunes of Medeas and Electras than they did on maintaining ...their empire and fighting for their liberty against the Persians." This view of the Athenians' misplaced priorities became orthodoxy with the publication of August Böckh's 1817 book Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener The Public Economy of Athens, which criticized the classical Athenian dēmos for spending more on festivals than on wars and for levying unjust taxes to pay for their bloated government. But were the Athenians' priorities really as misplaced as ancient and modern historians believed?Drawing on lines of evidence not available in Böckh's time, Public Spending and Democracy in Classical Athens calculates the real costs of religion, politics, and war to settle the long-standing debate about what the ancient Athenians valued most highly. David M. Pritchard explains that, in Athenian democracy, voters had full control over public spending. When they voted for a bill, they always knew its cost and how much they normally spent on such bills. Therefore, the sums they chose to spend on festivals, politics, and the armed forces reflected the order of the priorities that they had set for their state. By calculating these sums, Pritchard convincingly demonstrates that it was not religion or politics but war that was the overriding priority of the Athenian people.
States of credit Stasavage, David
2011., 20110705, 2011, 2011-07-05, Volume:
35
eBook
States of Credit provides the first comprehensive look at the joint development of representative assemblies and public borrowing in Europe during the medieval and early modern eras. In this ...pioneering book, David Stasavage argues that unique advances in political representation allowed certain European states to gain early and advantageous access to credit, but the emergence of an active form of political representation itself depended on two underlying factors: compact geography and a strong mercantile presence.
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