That’s the position of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. With Great Britain going out from the European Union, Juncker says the remaining nations will have to pony up yet more money “if we are to pursue European policies and fund them adequately[.]”
Currently, the EU budget is capped at 1% of the total of the EU members’ aggregated GDP. However, it’s not enough, though, that the remaining nations will have to fill the large-ish gap created by the British departure. Juncker wants yet more.
Yet, even that “have to fill” bit remains unjustified in any concrete terms.
Some of those new [policy] demands include building a common European defense, the fight against terrorism and protecting borders as more and more refugees and migrants seek to enter Europe. There are also calls to increase spending on research and making the bloc’s economy more competitive in the digital age.
Never mind that these are individual, sovereign nation needs. Nor is there need for any EU-level taxes—much less increased taxes—in order for the members to coordinate those programs among themselves. Ordinary trade agreements could achieve most of those, were EU legal requirements not in the way. Even the fight against terrorism and protecting borders: the US and Canada handle that between us, as do Mexico and us for the most part, and we don’t tax each other for the purpose.
Unspoken among those policies, too, is the demand for money to bail out individual member nations that have differing ideologies, for instance, about the purpose of money and of government. This at bottom is a diversity demand that’s driven by a concomitant too-great diversity of national political and social philosophies.
Juncker has pointed out that his tax demands amount to the price of a daily cup of coffee for the average taxpayer, while eliding the fact that that average taxpayer has little to no say regarding whether he’d rather have that daily cup than send his money off to Brussels.
I am of the opinion that Europe is worth more than a cup of coffee a day[.]
Europe, certainly. The EU, not so much. (Notice, too, Juncker’s mindset regarding national sovereignty with his careful conflation of the EU with Europe.)