"Conservative" Angela Merkel Governed Germany to the Left of Bernie Sanders

From Thom Hartmann's Hartmann Report:
Angela Merkel Governed Germany to the Left of Bernie Sanders: Why Don't Americans Know?
https://hartmannreport.com/p/angela-merkel-governed-germany-to

In America, conservatives don’t want women to get abortions and some conservatives are even proposing the death penalty for women who succeed in aborting a zygote or fetus.

Angela Merkel’s “conservatives” offer abortions to women in the first three months of pregnancy at no cost (if low-income) and with no excuses.

In America, conservatives don’t want the government to be funding or directly providing any sort of healthcare, saying that should be left to the “free market.” Healthcare is a privilege in America, ...

... in Germany guaranteed by the government (Germany got the world’s first single-payer system in 1884). Angela Merkel’s “conservatives” give free health insurance to anybody not able to pay, and those who can pay for health insurance do so according to a sliding scale based on income (like with progressive taxes). Nobody in Germany is uninsured; nobody goes broke or becomes homeless because a member of their family got sick.

In America, conservatives don’t think unions should exist with any government protections and employers should be able to destroy them at-will

Angela Merkel’s “conservatives” run a country where every company with over 1000 employees is required to have members of their board of directors made up of “works council” representatives and, although the deindustrialization of the country as a result of neoliberal “reforms” in the 1980s-1990s led to a huge loss of manufacturing jobs to outsourcing, unions and works councils still have great power and represent 97+ percent of all workers in large (1000+ employee) firms. ...

IG Metall, the nation’s largest union, recently “won its key demand that workers have the right to reduce their working week from 35 to 28 hours for a period of up to two years in order to care for family members.” Wait: did somebody say, “a 35-hour workweek with full-time pay” is normal in Germany?

In America, conservatives have fought any sort of mandatory paid vacation time so effectively that we’re the only fully developed country in the world that doesn’t require employers to offer it.

“Conservative” Merkel’s Germany requires a minimum of 24 workdays of paid vacation per year and 9-12 paid public holidays (depending on the state); most employers offer 5 or 6 weeks plus paid holidays.

In America, conservatives hate the idea of high-income people paying taxes to provide healthcare, education, housing or anything else for average people.

In Merkel’s “conservative” Germany, wealthy people paying a top 50.5 income tax rate is considered a social obligation…although you don’t have to file a tax return unless you think you’re entitled to a refund or have underpaid. The government does all the math. (We could do that here, but the tax preparation industry makes billions a year off us and buys off politicians…)