Socialists call for EU funding reform

1 Comment

1. Sander Driessen says:

   09/08/2018 at 17:13

   In Romania, where a bridge over a lake has been constructed, is unused for several years because the connecting highway is still not built due to bureaucracy and an example of wasted EU money. The Eurocrats in Brussels want to tighten the EU budget considerably in the coming years. Because of the Brexit the mandatory remittance of the Dutch, who have lost the most in proportion, will increase billions per year. Now that an official investigation also shows that all those Western European billions for poor regions in South and East Europe have little effect in their efforts and that they actually stimulate massive corruption. One would just like to see a sharp reduction in the EU-budget should argue. Judit Sargentini should carry out a thorough investigation into these wastes. In the past, 70% of the EU-budget was spent on agricultural subsidies, especially for France. Now that is ‘only’ 39%. Still too high because supporting farmers and wealthy landowners (including the British queen) with billions of tax money not only causes overproduction, but also removes every incentive to be competitive. This also means that poor African farmers do not stand a chance of gaining access to the European market which in turn contributes to poverty and the emigration flows to the EU.
   The European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) account for almost 35% of the EU budget and are intended to improve the economy and quality of life in poorer, disadvantaged regions. The money for this is provided by the richer countries and regions, which in effect means that there is an internal shift in prosperity. ‘Convergence’, or bringing together poor and rich regions, is the official goal of these funds. On the surface, this may seem a noble objective, especially given the widespread poverty that still prevails in Eastern European countries such as Romania and Bulgaria in particular. Nevertheless, a recent official investigation has shown that the positive effects of these billions from richer Western Europe are very small. Just as with the Marshall plan after WWII, it appears that transferring large sums of money to poor countries and areas hardly has any effect if this is not accompanied by good policy, i.e. the least bureaucracy, low taxes and legal guarantees for the private ownership of people and companies. In fact, free billions for poor areas often even backfire because the ‘social capital’, the cooperation and the trust between countries and citizens can decrease. This is also evident from a recent report from the Italian central bank that investigated the ‘unintended consequences of public transfers’ from EU members to southern Italy. € 43.8 billion of the abovementioned structural funds for Italy are transferred directly to the poorer south. The Italians found that in the areas that receive aid ‘EU deposits significantly increase the number of white-collar crimes’. In short: free money with almost no control and hardly any demands corruption encourages. If you can get funds so easily as a poor region, every incentive to make an effort to set up your own area disappears and the temptation for many officials and officials is obviously too big to not take the necessary grains. All this could have been and should have been known for a long time, because on the basis of numerous previous researches it has been established that the billions of aid to Third World countries in Africa, especially in Africa, have hardly achieved anything and have previously worked the opposite and the poverty and corruption in have held, or even increased. Why do all those millions want to come here seems to be no more than just question. OLAF, the official research agency of the EU, found in 2015 that nearly € 1 billion had been fraudulent with aid funds. A year later that was € 600 million. The cause is invariably the extremely excessive bureaucratic structure of Brussels and its poorer vassal states, which means that there is hardly any accountability for the money that has been received and spent. Corruption is a normal effect of interventionism, wrote Ludwig von Mises in his masterpiece Human Action. The investigation by the Italian central bank shows once again that the EU budget should not be increased as required by Brussels, but must be substantially reduced. Not only is it economically rather pointless to keep moving millions of tax money from North to South and from West to East, but it also causes large-scale corruption and passivity to the receiving and suspicious and resentment on the giving side. Also this shows that socialism and socialist policy, however ‘fair’, is presented by claiming that the rich should pay more for the poor, does not work. Development aid, whether it is to Africa or the poor regions in Eastern and Southern Europe, only makes sense if strict supervision and stringent verifiable requirements are attached to it and, moreover, it is made clear that this aid is limited and effective, and people should learn to stand on their own feet at a certain moment.