Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-03-Speech-3-181"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20011003.6.3-181"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, the Italian Radicals supported the resolution of the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats and the Group of the European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party because they consider it of vital importance that Parliament confirms the validity of the Stability and Growth Pact and its principles.
I feel that rigorous budgetary and monetary policies are not incompatible with growth, provided that we have the courage to act in the areas of structural reform, privatisation, liberalisation of the markets – particularly the labour market – and public spending, and provided that we have the courage to resolve the complex issue of pensions expenditure, which is an excessive burden on the budgets of many European countries and, because of the way these systems are organised, creates situations which are extremely unfair towards the young generations of workers.
I am quite aware that the European countries – I refer to my own country, Italy, in particular, but also to others such as Germany – rested on their laurels during the economic boom, putting off reforms which were necessary in order to consolidate public finances and make businesses competitive and giving way to pressure from trade unions and employers’ associations demanding more State aid. Thus, they failed to prepare the European economies for the inevitable subsequent slowdown, which will be particularly severe in the wake of the events of 11 September.
Mr President, in my opinion, the fiscal burden in Europe is still too high: although it has fallen somewhat, it is true, the figures show that the fiscal burden in Europe is still significantly higher than it was in the early nineties, for example.
Derogating from the constraints of the Stability and Growth Pact now and resorting to deficit spending means storing up fresh tax increases for the coming years which, in my opinion, the European economy, the European workers and the European unemployed can on no account afford.
There is one danger which must be highlighted – Mr Goebbels mentioned the confusion following the events of 11 September – and that is that Europe will use the current economic crisis and the crisis in the United States as an excuse to go back to expansionist, deficit spending policies such as those experienced by Europe and its citizens in previous decades. This is not the right response to the situation.
The argument that the United States is also reacting with an expansionist policy and that it is going to spend an additional 1% of its GDP disregards the fact that the United States is supported by healthy, buoyant public finances and therefore has the capacity to do so reasonably effectively. The same would not be true if we were to implement similar policies in Europe or to support State airlines which have drained public resources and hampered the liberalisation of the European markets.
I would like to stress one last point relating to the fight against terrorism and its funding. Something which is now increasingly being emphasised by expert analysts – recently even by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, Gary Becker – is the fact that the multinational terrorist organisations are financed by drug trafficking, particularly where Afghanistan and Pakistan are concerned.
We must also explore the possibility of cutting off this channel of terrorist funding at source through drugs policies not based on prohibition."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples