What's wrong with the EU deal for COVID recovery?

in #covid4 years ago


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-53481542

I'm sure you have heard "Landmark EU deal for COVID19 Recovery". My critical nature always asks "what's wrong with it?"

Thankfully, there are reporters with a similar bias of interest at The Economist, who analyzed it and wrote:

"There are two areas of concern. The first is the price demanded by the frugals. To preserve the recovery fund’s grants, cuts fell on so-called “future-oriented” areas like research, health-care and climate adjustment. These, critics grumble, are precisely the priorities the frugals claim should take precedence over agricultural and regional subsidies, which remain intact.

Moreover, the frugals won big increases to the rebates they get on their contributions to the EU budget. (Austria’s doubled.) These small-country triumphs cost money, and will have to be fought over again when the next MFF comes around. Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, has long wanted to eliminate the rebate system.

A second set of concerns centred on how to prevent handouts to countries that undermine the rule of law. The EU has long struggled to bring wayward governments like Hungary’s and Poland’s into line. Both are large net recipients from the MFF, and some hoped to pressure them by attaching rule-of-law conditions to disbursements. In the end the language agreed on is studiously ambiguous. It promises “a regime of conditionality to protect the budget” but is vague on how to obtain it."

The debt treadmill is going to break. The policies that enabled the unstable concentration of wealth just got kicked down the road. Debt is a construct that can vaporize, like in Iceland. I am amused by the attempts to tie relief to reversing the autocratic movements of Hungary and Poland as they slide into Right Wing Nationalism, which is even tighter control and elitism that Neo-Liberalism.

The inverted economic system where the most essential jobs get paid the least is bad for general prosperity, and only drives up the fake economic indicators over a limited period of time - which is why they can't pay for government services in real time and have to balloon debt.

This deal conforms to that general trend.

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.31
TRX 0.11
JST 0.035
BTC 66739.07
ETH 3228.97
USDT 1.00
SBD 4.23