Quote:
Originally Posted by Hugh
Isn’t that also what the EU does?
|
Not really.
The EU budget is small compared to a full national one, and the EU essentially has no direct tax raising power (albeit it automatically receives a slice of VAT receipts).
EU funds tend to be focused on strategic projects like infrastructure or other economic development. Such projects make a useful contribution to the places where they are located but they are nothing like the scale of wealth transfer that ensures a more-or-less uniform level of health, education and social service provision within a nation state.
The EU even lacks the basic mechanisms to prevent uneven currency accumulation within the Eurozone, both contributing to the recent crisis and hampering the solution. In the USA, which is amongst other things a single Dollar currency zone, around 60% of tax is collected at the Federal level. This helps ensure poor Louisiana is still recognisably in the same nation state as California, which even as a fully independent state would still have a G7 economy.