Here's the list.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o…

where does our tax money go?

This is a pretty easy question to answer given that you're talking about a public institution.

The only difficulty is that the answer is complex and requires reading and understanding many sets of financial reports and accompanying minutes et cetera.

a city near me just bought 32 benches at the cost of 70k€ EACH

That's a pretty absurd claim, and simply not how budgets in public institutions work.

Sure there might have been some kind of fuckup so installation of one of 32 benches cost $70k, or any number of other plausible explanations, but large public institutions don't just throw $2.25m EUR at the end of a quarter as a budget stuffing exercise.

just slim down the government

It's an easy thing to say, but even with the waste and bloat the government function itself is just a few percent of the expense. Pensions, health, education and child support are the vast majority of expenses. Remove the money from government, tack in on to pensions and you kicked the can down the road for another few years. After that the pension and health costs increases and eats up the extra money due to ageing of the population. Now you're back at square 1 but with a lot less people in government to keep things together.

You can't use immigrants to work jobs and pay taxes. It was tried, got a bunch of backlash in the end and by now the right has their campaigns ready to go all out if somebody suggests this. Birth rate is going down so it'll be rising costs of ageing and no new incomes from new workers. They're f-ed and know it. We all knew this moment would come, but if somebody suggested saving now for later they got voted out of office so nothing got done.

It depends on the country, I suppose.

I don't know enough about German politics to be able to place blame on anyone. I just know from observing US and UK politics that there is always a percentage of people who vote fascist thinking that it won't adversely affect their own lives personally.

Are you referring to SPD? They haven't bothered with actual left-leaning politics for a while. Die Linke is our party on the left, and they are experiencing a renaissance right now, but unfortunately not nearly as much as the far right.

To answer your question: Most German voters are centrists with a mix of vaguely conservative and social democratic views. And they've been exposed to economic anxiety narratives and xenophobic fear-mongering for the past two decades, while lacking the political education to smell the populist bullshit for what it is in a social media environment defined by anti-intellectualism and fake news.

politicalcompass.org/germany20…

Spd is a right leaning party no I'm talking about die linke

Edit: oops bsw is a russian support operation not a neoliberal party. I apologize for that mistake

I'm not sure how to make this any clearer: Die Linke is doing so much better both internally and in the polls / results since the fucks from BSW split off that I called it a renaissance twice now. And it was desperately necessary. BSW does not identify as left. Representatives actively reject the label and refuse to even pay lip service to leftist ideals, because they simply aren't left. It's time to let go of the notion this was "splitting the left".

Who really lost big time are the centrists. FDP, SPD, CDU to various degrees. Greens too but less so. Because xenophobic populism doesn't work for them nearly as well as it does for the fascists.

I should have recognized your point. Yes you are right. But I believe that the individual politicians inside of cdu csu sdp fdp etc as well as the bureaucrats inside of the state security apparatus believed that not countering russian propaganda would cleave the left and this may have backfired. Because it is strange that they outed afd as an obvious russian front but not bsw. Ex posto facto reasoning on my part but the other expla ation for the lack of action is that the German intelligence service truly believes that bsw is not a russian front or they think there's nothing illegal about russia operating a fake politician party.

But again I'm a foreigner who doesn't understand the German political system.

Im the usa though they did the same thing when they uncovered a russian influence campaign. They looked the other way and let it all go down (for the most part)