The gas levy is coming October 1. Concretely that means 2.419 euro cents more per kilowatt hour consumed – on top. So, the energy prices continue to rise in addition to the already absurdly high prices.
The levy lasts until April 2024 and can be readjusted every 3 months. According to bourgeois economists, it means that with an average consumption of 20.000 kWh a year the gas bill will increase about 120€ a year for single households and for a family of four it calculates to a whopping 483€, without value added tax. With the VAT added, the costs rise to around 140€ and 575€ respectively. This levy is intended to “save” the gas importers and to “distribute the costs among the population,” as Federal Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck puts it. In other words, the costs will be pushed down onto our backs as it always is.
While this is happening, the major European energy companies are currently recording massive revenues. German energy company RWE announced a doubling of profits to over two billion euro at the beginning of August, and British company Shell even as much as quintupled its profits in the second quarter of this year to 17,6 billion euro. France's TotalEnergies and Spain's Repsol can also boast billions of euros in increases. They are all currently profiting in record amounts from the energy emergency.
In addition to the energy monopolies however, other German monopolies are also profiting massively right now:
“Deutsche Post has already raised its profit forecast four times this year. Online trade is booming, and since the outbreak of the pandemic the spring before last, it has given the Post Office a permanent Christmas business.
Not only Deutsche Post, but also carmakers Daimler and Volkswagen, chemical manufacturers BASF and Covestro, semiconductor specialist Infineon, sporting goods group Adidas, IT and industrial company Siemens and many others have raised their forecasts in recent months, in some cases several times.
All these companies represent a trend: the gloom of the pandemic year 2020 is being followed by euphoria in the upswing year 2021. The total of 309 listed companies in the German Prime Standard have raised their profit or sales expectations 243 times this year, many of them several times, such as Deutsche Post.
According to calculations by consulting firm EY, there have never been so many upward revisions. More than half (53 percent) of the companies have raised their own annual forecast at least once - only nine percent corrected it downward. The reason for so many "upgrades" is that the economy is recovering. The global economy is growing faster than it has in almost 50 years. The many German corporations with strong foreign operations are benefiting extraordinarily from this.”
So, while the big monopolies are currently raking in profits as high as they haven’t been for a very long time, we are now supposed to only pay even higher gas prices, under the pretext of the war against the Ukraine. But reality speaks a completely different language, as the figures clearly show. With a trick of deception, it is discussed now whether an “excess profit tax” is to be introduced or not (whatever “excess profits” are supposed to be) and with it politics driven by the fact that Federal Minister of Finance Christian Lindner asks the EU whether one could perhaps exempt the gas levy from the VAT, as to not undermine profits from his buddies in the energy enterprises that way. The reduction of the VAT to 7% for gas, which “is supposed to” (but doesn't have to) be passed on to the end consumer, doesn't help much either and is just a cheap diversionary tactic. But despite all the deception and all the talk of war and crisis as an alleged pretext, you can clearly see who has to foot the bill for their power games and the current economically desolate situation: not those who are responsible for it, but us.
