Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheArcane | Hacker News Reader

So it basically goes to every EU member country.

In theory, yes, or more directly, it's a discount for contributions. But in practice, it's more complicated.

I don't even know where all the EU money goes to. Bailing out Greece and co? Subsidies?

Mainly subsidies of projects, they have an awesome website to explain this stuff: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/external/html/budgetataglance/... https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/money/expenditure_...

About 6% is administration.

Germany, the country that "bailed out" Greece the hardest, made big returns from it: 2.9 billion Euro since 2010 alone, with more profits on the horizon [1]. German defense contractors also sold some submarines even though Greece was effectively not able to buy them [2] and some regional Greek airports were bought by a large German airport company [3].

You can't deny that at least Germany made hefty profits from "bailing out" Greece.

Sources in German (maybe DeepL can help translate):

1: http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/griechenland-hilfe...

2: https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Griechische-Milliarden-fuer...

3: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/griechenland-fraport-...

So far and iff Greece does pay back the remaining debt. It’s not entirely uncommon for a lender to make some money from interest before the other party defaults and the lender loses its investment. Could you explain why this is controversial? Should Germany have donated funds to make up for the mismanagement of the Greek government?

It isn't controversial for me. I think it's correct to make a bit of money off of it, especially after Greece lied their way into the EU with fraudulent accounting. However, GGP said that the EU more or less donated money to Greece and that is just not factually correct.

In fact, GGP is also wrong in indirectly claiming that subsidies are bad. Every country on earth gives out subsidies to its economy and as the EU acts like a country in many ways (esp. wrt trade), it should give out subsidies to its economy.

GGP just tried to bash the EU with baseless arguments, as it almost always happens in such threads.

Here's a breakdown of spending:

http://ec.europa.eu/budget/mff/programmes/index_en.cfm

Any “bailout” you read in the papers is administered directly by member states and/or the ECB through additional mechanisms, outside of the regular EU budget.

EU budget goes mostly to funding long-running development and cooperation programs (Erasmus, Euratom, infrastructure in poorer areas, etc etc).

Mostly subsidies and keeping things running. The EU budget is only about 140bn/year (or, 280 euro per person per year).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com