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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Much to my annoyance, despite this being practically a rounding error (like, 1% or so of GDP), the EU budget contributions absolutely did have this effect in the UK.

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Well, the thing is: French budget reforms that the government wants to do is 40 billion EUR, their net contribution is 10 billion. Just going to neutral gets you a 4th of the way there without touching your internal social security. If you cancel contributions that's 25 billion, that's 60% of the way there.

Not saying I agree but this sort of argument will be impossible to counter for centrists with the mounting populist backdrop.

Being the French, their tactics will rather be what it always has been: Not reduce their contribution, but vastly increase their received subsidies from the EU. That way, they can let the EU subsidize what they can no longer afford to pay for with their own money. The EU will go along with this because this is the accepted MO of France's EU contributions since forever, and increased spending towards France will increase the EU's overall budget and therefore importance. The only unhappy member states will be Germany and a few unimportant small payer states. But Germany has always gone along with those shenanigans, so no reason to think they won't happily open their wallet again...

1% of GDP of an entire country is massive, that's not a rounding error!

Massive numbers for an individual are commonly rounding errors for a nation.

Specifically, if you see a budget breakdown, generally things are rounded to the nearest 1%, and the sum of numbers shown often turns out not to be 100% because of that rounding.

That governments struggle with rounding and maths isn't a justification for arguing 1% of GDP doesn't matter. It's a vast sum of money. In the UK's case getting an extra 1% of GDP for free was a no brainer. Its economy hasn't departed from the European average so what was it paying for, apparently nothing.

> It's a vast sum of money.

It's 1%.

1% of your pay is what?

1% of everyone's pay is just that everyone feels the impact of 1% of their income.

> In the UK's case getting an extra 1% of GDP for free was a no brainer. Its economy hasn't departed from the European average so what was it paying for, apparently nothing.

Except for all the evidence that it has harmed the UK, which Brexit proponents blame on the simultaneous Covid pandemic.

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