Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-17-Speech-2-170"
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"en.20021217.5.2-170"2
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"I believe, as has been so often repeated, that we can indeed be truly satisfied with this budget. Nevertheless now that I have heard everyone in this long debate, I wonder if what we are experiencing today is not the quiet before the storm. This time it has all gone well, we all got through it satisfactorily, but we have put things off till the future. How will things go next year? How can this budget continue in the long term to fulfil the function it fulfils at present if it is talked about in such overblown terms? If one listens to the individual Finance Ministers, it seems as if the major part of their problems resides in this European budget. I explain to people in the Netherlands that out of every hundred euros that they earn, they pay forty-three euros in tax and that only one euro of that goes to the European Union. Yet everyone wonders why so much is spent, although from a national perspective relatively little money is involved. I fear that one of the reasons is that it is a nice red herring, because one then does not need to talk about the billions that are spent at national level. People are reluctant to look closely at these. But they are always prepared to talk about what is after all a relatively insignificant sum, especially because it is supposedly going abroad and that is always easier to talk about. So I think that we must bear this in mind.
If for example you look at defence expenditure, which is of course entirely national, you find that we spend approximately half what the Americans spend, but that we achieve only ten per cent of the return. So you can easily see that a collective approach to such a policy can solve many more problems than doing it all separately. I believe that recently such noises are heard too infrequently. Everyone is surely too preoccupied with the relatively small amount. That is hanging over our heads and that is, I believe the quiet we are still experiencing, which may become a storm once we are confronted with all the consequences of the expansion. We can survive it, we have laid the right foundations, but we must be certain that we can see it through."@en1
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