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Comment by basil-rash | Hacker News Reader

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The money goes to the EU institutions and EU projects like fixing the infrastructure in a region with poor investment etc. The corruption tends to happen on the last minle, where the contractors might misappropriate money together with the local politicians. For example, they might use thinner asphalt than required, cover it up and split the savings with the local politicians.

As the British found out, the EU funds are quite useful for regions where the free market doesn't do good. That's how even the poorest places tend to be quite nice in EU.

The poorest places in the EU are nice because the EU specifically excludes nations where the poorest places aren’t nice. I can assure you the poorest places in the rim around the EU that are not welcome to join: Ukraine, Turkey, Belarus, are not as nice.

In other words, the selection bias is very strong.

No it doesn't work like that. When you want to join EU, you first become a candidate country and you start receiving EU money to fix your institutions and infrastructure and you keep getting more and more as you integrate and then you become EU country when you are ready. Turkey for example, a candidate country, received quite a bit of EU money until most of the funds got cut once the country drifted away politically. Yet, the EU funds and the institutional changes done to get these fund helped a lot and the country got in much better place during the decade they were getting ready to join EU.

Why EU is doing this? Well because, its much better to have prosperous and stable neighbours even if they don't end up join. Because of this, despite the politics Turkey and EU have very strong trade and security relations.

The same goes for every country, eastern European countries were a shit hole for quite a long time after the collapse of the USSR and they transformed to be good enough to join EU and they did use EU resources when transforming.

> the funds got cut once the country drifted away politically

Yes, my point exactly. It’s a system where the EU can at any point decide to pull funds and say “you didn’t jump through enough hoops, begone”, and will happily do so to maintain the perception that all is perfect in European government: after all, everyone who disagrees isn’t allowed a seat.

The EU member states get a big tax rebate at the end of the year. They're free to use this money to give tax rebates to their citizen or use it to build new infrastructure.

1.8B is about one percent of the budget. So not that big of a rebate, especially when split among all member countries pro rata.

Sure, it's less than 10€ per person.

The EU has about 450M inhabitants, so that would amount to €4 each. Your suggestion is vile, and you didn't even bother with the basic arithmetic. Kindly fuck off.

Could you explain what you think is vile about it?

I can't read it anymore, but there were two points, IIRC:

1. The suggestion that it's just a money grab. Of course it's a decent amount of money, but it has to be in order not to be just another sternly worded letter.

2. The implication that politicians are corrupt. Some will be, that's an unfortunate fact, but a slap-dash statement that they all are doesn't serve any purpose but to undermine trust in the institutions and democracy.

And the cause cannot really be disputed. I'm a bit of an Apple fanboy, and I'm somewhat opposed to non webkit browsers on iOS, and alternative app stores (but that's another story), but Apple clearly misbehaved in this case, and only for their own profit.

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