Light Europe: low cost to the citizens and big returns for the States
Light Europe, profitable Europe. Thus the Union reveals itself as inexpensive for its citizens in a careful analysis – less than a cup of coffee a day – and very generous with its Member States, with some more than others. The EU has fewer employees than the Sicily region and these do not weigh heavily on the budget, as is the case for those in the Capitol for the city of Rome.
And if it costs little, it returns 93% of what it collects, favoring more and more funding in terms of research and development, innovation and new technologies and aid to the regions, to the detriment in part of the agricultural sector. For some member countries the advantage is clear, reachingnearly 10% of GDP, as in the case of Bulgaria and Lithuania; it stops at 5% for Estonia, Poland, Latvia and Romania and for sovereignist Hungary that receives more than problematic Greece.
The Union budget, which amounted to 137 billion in 2017, is small scale but has significant repercussions and is subject to argumentsand member claims due to its lack of economic independence, which makes 70% of it subject to claims and demands from individual countries and only a subsequent 15% ‘financed’ by customs duties, 80% of which it currently collects.
In this context there is a controversy over the opportunity for the Union to make use of its own taxation through both the increase inquotas of customs duties from 80 to 90%, a tax on Co2 emissions and a tax on financial transactions, as well as the transferof corporation tax to the EU.
In the controversy the sovereign worm with its ambiguous duplicity inevitably insinuates itself: on the one hand the ferocious reaffirmation of the sovereignty of the nation state, on the other the delegitimization of the EU – that set of states, in terms of sharing and in function of community ideals – of that sovereignty of which it is the fruit.
The European Union represents, with its size per square km and its inhabitants, a much stronger and representative system of the individual states that compose it, even in the global comparison with the other super powers, such as China and the USA. The extent of Europe’s benefits in terms of free movement of goods and above all individuals can only be measured when those benefits could be lost, today when European cousins need a passport to visit London.
With the Brexit ends an era, begun by the “we want our money back” from the period of the Iron Lady, crossed by the distrust in the single currency and the consequent exclusion and safeguard of the pound, and ended with the United Kingdom’s upcoming exit from the Union, with the most impacting consequences on the economy: the British first became convinced of the extreme ratio and then they wanted the head of the premier who designed it.
