While the exact amount of these transfers is difficult to calculate, Hans-Werner Sinn once estimated that transfers paid up to the present day amount to around € trillion – roughly the size of the German GDP in 1991,4 but this number certainly comprises more than just the transfers via the social security system.
A central tenet of “Jumpstart” is that it would have been much cheaper to compensate employees for accepting lower wages than to compensate the unemployed for their job losses.5 “Implement distributional objectives through transfers and not by altering factor prices” was the economic principle that Hans-Werner Sinn saw violated in the formation of the  2  Sinn, Gerlinde and Sinn, Hans-Werner (1993).