Tuesday, March 20, 2007

 

There´s only two kinds of money: yours & mine


This is a quote from an interesting article I read in der Spiegel about this years budget of the european union, which is looking to reach the new record of 140 billion euros. Now what´s really sad about it isn´t the amount of money itself but that over 90% of it will - as usual- not be well accounted for. Dig this: for twelve years in a row the european court of auditors the institution monitoring the usage of the money has refused to refused its approval due to:
  • multiple booking of funds
  • false bills
  • obvious "irregularities" between agricultural subsidies and satellite pictures
  • as well as - you guessed it- criminal arrangements between authorities and fraudsters

It seems there´s quite a clean-up for Mrs. Merkel to do in her current leadership of the european union, after all: regardless of several uncovered scandals to date not a single EU-official has been fired. The worst they have to fear is a transfer to a different position, well that´s what I call incentive to plunder...

Anyway the funny part lies with another story of european parlaments use of tax-payers money. When not so long ago in the wake of the Asian Tsunami the european parlament was debatting on helping the affected countries one speaker after another stepped onto the podium demanding more and more millions for the region. It seemed that they were in some kind of euphoric race to demonstrate empathy by spendings billions of tax-payers money. However when one italian representative suggested to also donate the days attendance fees -the stately sum of 290 Euros which every representative receives additionally to their wages and allowances- tempers turned and became gloomy. The poor man was forced to resign his proposal albeit the parlament passed a bill for 1,5 billion euros of aid. It seems the italian representative was asking for too much.

As Milton Friedman would say: "There´s only two kinds of money - yours and mine". :)


Comments:
Good for people to know.
 
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