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DW - Visualizing Germany's investment gap

This piece would be forshadowing to the massive spending package agreed to by the CDU/SPD/Greens in March 2025. But in early January, in preparation for our election coverage, I tried to visualize how much money would be needed to close Germany’s investment gap.

It’s a lot and I struggled to make cardboards that were large enough and still fit into the studio.

Mathis with a big piece of cardboard to the size of €600bn Making to scale cardboards is fun math but annoying to find large enough cardboards.

Mathis a piece of cardboard cutting out the yearly amout to compare to the household. The problem with a one-off cost of €600 bn is – nobody knows anything that is large enough to compare it to.

We went with comparing it to the entire German federal budget – and then had to break it down to yearly figures. I’m not sure it worked to show how much money it actually is.