Germany’s ruling coalition grapples with a wrecked budget

German is famed for long, powerful words that deliver meaning with pinpoint accuracy. The term Schuld is not one of these. Confusingly, its six letters convey two very different ideas. Schuld means both guilt, as in mea culpa, and debt, as in onerous money obligations. This mental link helps explain Germany’s peculiar concern with saving governments from the imagined sin of borrowing money. In 2009 legislators inserted a Schuldenbremse or “debt brake” into the constitution, placing an annual cap on deficit spending of 0.35% of GDP on the federal budget (except in emergencies) and banning state governments from running deficits at all (as in many states in America). Predictably, these limits have prompted politicians to get creative, such as by putting borrowed money into off-budget special-purpose funds.