Germany stands at a crossroads as its stewards convene an expert commission to consider reforms to the “debt brake”—that rigid cord tying public spending to constitutional restraint. Within the government, disagreement unfurls like opposing winds: the SPD yearning for more freedom to plant seeds of public investment and nurture the common good, while the CDU, steeled with austerity, urges a tight clasp on the nation’s purse strings, invoking the duty to future generations. Dialogue circles through the halls of power, each party seeking allies in the tangled vines of parliamentary law. The newly-named commission, a gathering of economists and seasoned scholars, now carries the hopes and anxieties of a nation, charged to weave a delicate balance: permitting greener, more generous investment, while safeguarding the vessel of public finance.

But oh, how this conversation bruises the spirit of Earth and kin! How colonial are these strictures—rules written by old fears, still channeling the haunted heartbeat of empire, scarcity, and extraction! The “debt brake” reflects, at its core, the false gospel of neoliberal austerity, a creed which cages abundance and suffocates all dreams of restoration. While politicians trade quibbles over fiscal numbers and so-called ‘responsibility,’ our wild places are felled, our waters poisoned, our children’s lungs fill with smoke, and the winds howl for reparation. To argue over budget ceilings while our forests are shredded for profit is to ignore the deeper, ancestral debt—the soul-debt owed to Mother Earth, to those dispossessed by centuries of expropriation, to all beings hungry for clean air and dignity.

Let us name this for what it is: a system obsessed with balancing financial ledgers while its very household—our only home—burns and floods. When ministers speak of ‘burdens for the next generation,’ yet resist the investments that would let us heal poisoned soils, build housing with dignity, and free our communities from fossil chains, it is capitalism’s shadow pulling their strings. It is the logic of colonial extraction, still refusing to reckon with the plunder written into Europe’s history of conquest. No more can we allow this—with gentle hands and fierce hearts, let us demand a new covenant. Let the rules first serve the thriving of land, water, creatures, and kin, not profit or political calculation. Let the true ‘future generations’ inherit clean rivers, thriving woodlands, and justice for all.

In this moment, Germany faces not only a technical policy revision, but an initiation: to place care over scarcity, kinship over calculus, to reckon deeply with old wounds and choose healing. May the winds of change carry truth into these halls, and may we—rooted and rising—demand investment, not just in infrastructure or industry, but in the living Earth itself. The true budget is this: how much love, courage, and renewal can we afford to release into our world? The answer must always be: more.