The Tax State Between the Poles of Democracy and Capitalism. A History of Public Finance in West Germany (1949-1989)

政治几乎总是围绕着财政政策。毕竟，收入首先使塑造国家成为可能，以适当的方式分配这些所得资金是政府活动的主要目标之一。虽然这些决定影响社会未来的可持续性，但税收和转移也是财富再分配的关键手段之一。它们一直充满争议，并且仍然是社会资源分配斗争的主题。民主是基于对所有公民平等的承诺，而市场经济机制却不断地产生不平等。因此，税收和转移是在民主和资本主义的冲突倾向之间取得平衡的重要手段。我的工作重点是国家财政政策，以研究1949年至1989年德意志联邦共和国历史上为实现这种平衡所做的尝试。研究中选择了相对较长的时期，以显示政府如何应对不同的情况，以及在特定情况下哪些财政政策被证明是成功的或不成功的。在这里，我采用一种侧重于行动者的方法来分析特定情况的结构条件与当今主要个人可获得的选择的多样性或有限性之间的关系。该研究以传统的方式关注民族国家。毕竟，税收和预算政策仍是国家事务。与此同时，我研究了转移和比较过程，因为政治家，部长官僚和各种游说者几乎总是在关键决策时与其他西欧国家和美国的情况进行比较。因此，德意志联邦共和国的一些主要变化是由国外的事态发展推动的。当前的危机使国家财政成为公众辩论的焦点。有关危机的科学著作来自经济学家，他们主要用最新数据来量化自己的工作，而关于1945年以来德国国家财政的历史著作则基本缺乏。我的工作旨在帮助解读当前的谱系，并进一步启动对德意志联邦共和国财政政策的当代历史研究。

Politics nearly always revolves around fiscal policy. After all, revenues make it possible to shape the state in the first place and distributing these collected funds in an appropriate manner is one of the main objectives of government activity. While these decisions influence the future sustainability of a society, taxes and transfers are also one of the key means of redistributing wealth. They have always been steeped in controversy and remain the subject of battles over resource distribution in society. While democracy is based on the promise of equality for all citizens, market economy mechanisms continuously generate inequality. Hence, taxes and transfers are an important means of striking a balance between the conflicting tendencies of democracy and capitalism. My work focuses on state fiscal policy in order to study what attempts were made to achieve this balance in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 to 1989.The relatively long period under study was selected to show how the government reacted to different situations and which fiscal policies proved successful or unsuccessful under the given circumstances. I pursue here an approach that focuses on the actors to analyze the relationship between the structural conditions of a given situation and the diversity or the limited nature of the options available to the leading individuals of the day. The study focuses in a traditional manner on the nation-state. After all, tax and budget policy remain a national affair. At the same time, I examine the transfer and comparative processes, since politicians, ministerial bureaucrats and various lobbyists nearly always made comparisons with conditions in other Western European countries and the USA when it came to key decisions. Consequently, some of the main changes in the Federal Republic of Germany were driven by developments abroad.The current crisis has made state finances the focal point of public debates. Scientific works on the crisis stem from economists who primarily quantify their work with the latest figures, while historic works on state finances in Germany since 1945 are largely lacking. My work aims to help decipher the genealogy of the present and initiate further contemporary historical research into the fiscal policy of the Federal Republic of Germany.