Yes, but the EU budget is special in several ways. One is that they can't directly control most tax rates. The EU isn't funded by direct income taxation, for i

Yes, but the EU budget is special in several ways. One is that they can't directly control most tax rates. The EU isn't funded by direct income taxation, for instance. But they can raise funds via fines, which aren't tried in court and go directly into the EU's own budget (there's a huge conflict of interest here). Another is that the EU's budget normally only ever goes up. It's a part of the whole plan for the EU to constantly subsume more and more from national governments. The obvious view of the EU is it has a budget so it can provide services but this isn't how the EU officials themselves see it. That's why the fight over the Brexit budget hole is so bitter. Someone unfamiliar with the EU might think, well, the EU is smaller now, so it should be just fine with a correspondingly smaller budget. But it's not that way because the size of the budget is psychological. If it shrinks it's the project going into reverse, not a mere re-allocation of service resources. I think we keep seeing dubious fines by the EU against US tech firms and although it's unpopular, I tend to agree with adventured. A lot of these fines are enormous and backed by no real robust system of justice. A government simply decrees without trial that a tech firm must pay them a billion euros. A billion here, a few hundred million there - it starts to add up. From the EU perspective sucking gold out of tech firms is not only free money but even better, populist free money, because they can demonise these companies and claim to be fighting for the consumer. Whether they actually are or not doesn't get a close look.