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Dunno. My impression is that with the EU, we pick its suboptimal parts and compare them to what they could be with optimal execution. We don’t look either at t
by rich_sasha 10d ago
Dunno. My impression is that with the EU, we pick its suboptimal parts and compare them to what they could be with optimal execution.
We don’t look either at the successful parts, not at the world where it is wholesale gone. My gut feeling is that EU members are, on the whole, much better off for being in than out. One natural experiment is the UK - opinions differ, but the drastic accumulation of problems coincides with Brexit timings.
I’m all for improving the EU! And for sure there are bad bits. But when your car AC is doing badly, you don’t write off the car. You try to fix the AC…
- hermitShell 10d agoPeople sometimes call EU the sleeping giant. Big potential compared to the actual results. I'm more aware of what Canadian government does with its tax dollars. And I'm just assuming that the EU is similarly quite expensive for what it achieves, and the budgets only change in one direction.
- rich_sasha 10d agoEU budget is actually quite small - about 1% of GDP. That’s very small compared to EU members states national budgets, which sit at around 35% of GDP, apparently. Canadian federal government apparently spends 18-20% of Canadas GDP, topped up by local governments. This is all very apples-to-oranges but doesn’t support the thesis that EU budget is particularly bloated.