Austria’s Fiscal Deterioration

May 12, 2025 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I’ve written several times about the “Austrian School” of economics, but I’ve never written about the economics of Austria.

Since I just spoke in Vienna on the topic of that nation’s fiscal policy, this is a good opportunity to make up for the lack of attention.

Though it will be a depressing topic. As illustrated by this chart based on IMF data, the burden of government spending has expanded significantly over the past six years.

In other words, Austria’s economy was burdened by excessive government before the pandemic and now has an even bigger burden of spending today.

This is a recipe for economic stagnation (and you can see from the chart that nominal GDP growth is roughly even with inflation, so the past six years have not been very successful).

To make matters worse, Austria has an aging population that will lead to an even-greater fiscal burden (unlike many other European nations, it has not created private retirement accounts).

As is so often the case, bad spending policy is correlated with bad tax policy.

Here’s a chart from the OECD’s 2025 version of Taxing Wages.

As you can see, the tax burden on average workers in Austria is the third-highest among all member nations.

For purposes of comparison, I also circled the United States to show that Americans are very fortunate not to have an Austrian-sized welfare state.

This is because no country has ever figured out how to finance a big welfare state just by taxing the rich. Simply stated, there are not enough of them. As such, a big welfare state inevitably and always means a stifling tax burden on lower-income and middle-class taxpayers.

I also highlighted Switzerland because I asked the audience whether they think they get more and better services from government than their Swiss neighbors (where government spending consumes 32 percent of GDP rather than 56 percent of GDP and the tax burden is far lower).

Needless to say, none of the Austrians thought they had a better government that was more efficient at providing roads, schools, and healthcare (I got the same response back in 2013 when posing the same question to a French audience).

So I concluded by telling them they needed to copy Switzerland’s spending cap. And I also gave a plug for Swiss federalism.

P.S. American politicians who opposed entitlement reform implicitly favor Austrian-style taxes for America.

P.P.S. While today is the first time I’ve written about overall Austrian economic policy, I have a addressed a couple of quirky policy issues in that nation. In 2015, I wrote about a strange case of tax-free prostitution. And in 2013, I wrote about an even-stranger case of government mooching.

Massive U-Turn: Austria to Repeal Almost All ‘Corona Apartheid’ Rules Targeting Unvaxxed

Peter Caddle17 Feb 2022 2,396

In what amounts to a seismic u-turn in policy, Austria is to relax all ‘Corona Apartheid’ rules targetting the nation’s unvaccinated, despite having previously promised to keep unjabbed individuals under perpetual lockdown. Austria’s coalition government has announced that the vast majority of lockdown measures in place in the country — including the almost all “Corona Apartheid” restrictions specifically targeting the nation’s unvaccinated — are to be scrapped from March 5.............To Read More....

• Following the Polling Science - The rapid collapse of the COVID state, politicians insist, is just a matter of following the science. And that's true. They neglect to mention that it's the science of polling that they're following. As bad as the public polls are (and public polls are usually bad in more ways than one) the internal polls are much worse. When you see politicians suddenly dramatically changing course, you know that either something big is going on behind the scenes or the internal polls are catastrophic. And these are catastrophic................3 comments
• ‘The Country Will Reopen’ – Dutch Government Announces Dramatic Loosening of COVID Rules - The Dutch government has announced that it will be dramatically loosening its COVID lockdown rules over the coming weeks, with the nation’s health minister declaring that ‘the country will reopen’.
•  Northern Ireland Lifts Lockdown Rules as South Considers Similar Loosening - Northern Ireland is to lift almost all of its remaining COVID Lockdown rules, with authorities in the south of the island also considering easing a raft of measures.
•  COVID prompts shape-shifting at the New York Times February 18, 2022 Two days after the New York Times denounced Joe Rogan for having a conversation on COVID, it questioned "Following the Science" and said we need "conversation." Did the "party line" change? 
• A pandemic driven by politics, not science February 18, 2022 Only coming elections seem to be capable of making the leftist acolytes of these lockdowns snap out of it. 

INSANE: Austrian Government Authorizes Dystopian Vaccine Registry and Imposes COVID Restrictions Through January 2024 – Will Begin Pulling Drivers Over at RANDOM and FINING UN-BOOSTED Citizens Next Month

By Julian Conradson February 7, 2022 

This week, Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen imposed new Covid restrictions that require all adults in the country to be fully vaccinated and boosted or risk being fined.  The new authoritarian law runs through January 31st, 2024, and will go into effect next month.  Beginning on March 15th, law enforcement authorities will begin checking people’s vaccine status by conducting random traffic stops, and spot checks, in order to find dissenters. Anyone caught violating the mandate can be fined “up to four times a year,” with the penalty increasing with each violation. An individual’s first offense will result in a €600 (~$687) fine and can go as high as €3,400 (~$3,890) by the fourth........The new law also allows the Austrian government to create a dystopian vaccine registry that will record everyone who has been vaccinated and give those who have been found disobeying a date they must be vaccinated by, allowing the government to fine them repeatedly.............To Read More....

Official Data: In Terms Of Precipitation; In Austria There’s Been No Climate Change At All In 140 Years

By P Gosselin 28 January 2022 From the NoTricksZone 56 Comments

 

Climate alarmists have climate horror scenarios for every corner of the globe, and that includes the Austrian Alps. Climate models warn that snow will disappear soon and even gravely harm the ski industry unless we vaccinate the climate against CO2! No water water scarcity or pollution. In his most recent video, Austrian ski industry researcher Günther Aigner looks if it’s true that there’s been a trend towards water scarcity in the Alps.  Moreover, he looks at the question of whether or not manmade snow production is taking water away water from residents and farmers in the Alps. The findings:

No trend change in 140 years!..........To Read More...

Vaccine Mandates Abroad Suggest Ominous Lessons

Those who can see where this is going should do what they can to make sure Britain and America remain beacons of hope.  

By Alex Story  December 13, 2021

Britain shines bright when you are far from home. Even more so when the continent is fast sinking into a dystopian nightmare.  So it was particularly heartbreaking to hear Boris Johnson, a few days ago, saying that the country needs to have a “national conversation” about vaccine mandates.  While he refrained from the topic in his recent televised address, there was an unmistakable sense of foreboding. “We are now facing an emergency” he said and we must “get boosted now to protect our NHS, our freedoms and our way of life.”  When asked about his concerns on further restrictions on Channel 4 news yesterday, Steve Baker, MP for Wycombe, said “this happens time and again. We get drawn into these things bit by bit with shifting goalposts.”

The jury is still out on Omicron but data seem to suggest that while it spreads faster, it is also much milder than previous strands.  In other countries, though, the new variant wasn’t even needed to justify increased restrictions.  In Austria for instance, where I currently live with my family, weeks before the appearance of Omicron the government had already started to work on the implementation of a “vaccine mandate” with a deadline of February 1, 2022........But what does “being vaccinated” officially mean? Is it one jab, two shots, a booster?.............To Read More...

Rape and Murder? It’s Political

July 12, 2021 — John Hinderaker

In Austria, a 13-year-old girl was raped and murdered. Four Afghan immigrants were arrested for the crime.

The alleged rape and murder of 13-year-old Leonie has shocked much of Austria as it was revealed that several of the four Afghans arrested or wanted for arrest in the case had prior, years-old deportation orders against them, as well as prior criminal convictions.

This kind of story recurs over and over again when immigration laws are not enforced.

The teen’s body was found wrapped in a carpet against a tree. She had allegedly being given as many as eleven pills of the drug MDMA/ecstasy by four Afghan migrants, who are said to have raped her before her death.

A tragic story, which can be partly redeemed, if at all, by a vigorous criminal prosecution. Which is where the Left comes in.

A mob of far-leftists stormed the offices of a newspaper that revealed the nationalities of suspects arrested for the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl...........According to a report from Oe24, the extremists stormed the office to oppose “racist reporting” regarding the rape and murder of a 13-year-old Austrian girl named Leonie, who was allegedly killed by a group of Afghan migrants late last month in Vienna...................

This is typical liberal insanity. What “racism,” a “sexist society,” “capitalism” or “patriarchy” had to do with the rape and murder of this girl cannot be explained. The crime can only be attributed to the criminals who committed it.   Which, of course, is what liberals in Austria, as in the U.S., cannot abide............To Read More.....

 

Austria Reeling From Migrants' Murder of Women

When patriarchy and misogyny among foreigners spawn killings.  

January 30, 2019  Stephen Brown  8

It is definitely not how Austrians wanted to begin the New Year.

 

In a bloody start to 2019, four women have been brutally murdered in the peaceful Alpine nation of almost 9 million people in just over two weeks, shaking the country to its core.

 

With an additional two murders of women committed last December, the tally of this “femicide,” as it is being termed, stands at six in a little over five weeks. (There have been no male murder victims.) And this in a country with the very low murder rate of only .66 per 100,000 people! (The United States, by contrast, has 5.35)

 

What is conspicuous to Austrians about these terrible tragedies is that all the women-killers, except one, are not native Austrians. (Non-Austrians are only 15 per cent of the population.) Another visible factor is most murders were committed by partners or ex-partners of women who were about to leave, or had left, relationships with their killers.

 

“It is striking that many foreigners and asylum seekers are found over proportionally among the suspects. That suggests that this group is particularly misogynistic and patriarchist oriented,” said social scientist Birgitt Haller of the Institute for Conflict Research in Vienna.

 

Police concur. They report that sometimes when called to a migrant home where the husband is physically abusing his wife: “Then he doesn’t understand at all why he is not allowed to hit his wife and why he has to leave the apartment.” ...........To Read More.....

 

 

Austria Votes: Small Parties Could Unsettle Vienna

By Walter Mayr

A grand coalition has ruled Austria for almost seven years and most of the postwar period. But rising support for upstart and populist parties could disrupt that trend after Sunday's parliamentary elections.  The best person to ask whether Werner Faymann is the right man for Austria is Faymann himself. Otherwise, you'd have to listen to what members of his cabinet are saying about him.

The interior minister has publicly berated Faymann as a "chancellor of lies," and the foreign minister has sharply accused Faymann's Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) of being especially adept "at spending money." Moreover, a state secretary related to his hooting supporters a quip reportedly made by German Chancellor Angela Merkel: "When he comes to my office, he usually has no opinion; when he leaves, he usually has my opinion."

The interesting thing common to all these disparaging remarks about Faymann in the run-up to the country's parliamentary election is that they aren't being voiced by the opposition, but by politicians within the center-right Austrian People's Party (ÖVP), which has ruled as part of a coalition government with Faymann's SPÖ since 2007. In fact, this has been the case for much of the time since 1945. For many Austrians, the grand coalition of Social Democrats and Christian Democrats is the almost natural manifestation of Austrian postwar democracy…..To Read More…..

My Take - The reason I posted this article is to emphasize this pattern is repeating all over the world. In the U.S. we have sections of Maryland and California demanding to secede from their states and create their own states. 

We see segmentation on a large scale in every political division in the world. People aren't happy; people are scared; people no longer have a sense of long term security. It's a Machiavellian principle. In his book "The Prince", he outlined this simple unassailable observation; (paraphrasing) there are only two groups of people in the world; the privileged and the common people. The privileged only want one thing; to maintain their privileges. 

The common people only want three hots and a cot, i.e., security! If either one of those groups feel threatened as a group....governments fall.  There are a great many feeling threatened.  What happens when the E.U. collapses?  What happens when the Mediterranean E.U. countries default?  What happens to the world’s banks when that happens?  We need to stop being delusional and recognize  that humanity is on a dangerous road - and there are man-eating lions at the end of that road. 

The Demagogue of Vienna

by Andrei Znamenski on July 23, 2013

[Part 2 of In the Shadow of Dr. Lueger, Independent Review, 2013. Click here for Part 1.]

Having discovered the enormous power of collective will, Dr. Lueger successfully blended into his propaganda work “three bigs”: nationalism, religion, and socialism. From early on, he billed himself as an advocate of the “little people.” Raised by a widowed mother, Lueger managed to get a law degree and quickly made a name for himself as a protector of the common folk against “big shots.” As mayor, he enjoyed the tremendous support of Vienna’s workers, shopkeepers, and underclass elements.

 These predominantly German-speaking Catholics felt that they were cheated by the rich and displaced by the influx of Slavic, Hungarian, and especially Jewish migrants to the city. The latter usually sided with another group of collectivists — Social Democrats, who challenged Lueger’s Christian socialism with their class-based Marxist socialism. The contest between these two groups of collectivists for the minds of the masses was epitomized in a personal tug of war between Dr. Lueger and Victor Adler, a Jewish Marxist and leader of the Austrian Social Democrats.

Culturally and ethnically, many in the large Jewish community of Vienna did not fit into Lueger’s movement, which was heavily loaded with “soil-based”Catholicism and Germanic tradition. Thus, they instinctively gravitated toward the cosmopolitan message of Marxism (the famous Marxian motto being “workers have no fatherland”), which perfectly resonated with the people residing in diasporas…..acquaintances sincerely wondered why Mises, being of Jewish origin, was somehow not a socialist....To Read More.....