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Comment by gmerc | Hacker News Reader

Economic zones are NOT zero sum.

And the EU wants to insulate itself from Russia with friendly, ideologically-compatible countries. Can't put a price tag on safety

That also works the other way around: Eastern European countries wanted to join the EU (ok, more importantly NATO, but also the EU) to make sure they never ever again slid into Russia's "sphere of influence". Notwithstanding certain populist EU-skeptic right wing parties that don't seem to mind that anymore (some would say because they are financed by Russia), that's generally still true...

I agree, but people are very weary of these things because of the (correct) belief that their appropriation is guided by unaccountable bureaucrats. It stands in need of justification that Europeans feel they never got to hear

> but people are very weary of these things because of the (correct) belief that their appropriation is guided by unaccountable bureaucrats.

People believe this because every single member state is using EU institutions as a punching bag whenever they have issues locally. The people have no idea how the EU work, they only hear about it when used as a bogeyman

I agree, but subsidies aren't free as well. Simply making the overall cake bigger doesn't necessarily pay out for everyone - some have to foot the bill.

Why not? If the increase in cake size is bigger than the subsidies then it can be a net win, even for the people paying the subsidies.

It also ignores the fact that absent the EU, countries would still have a lot of subsidies.

Because the total increase of the cake can mostly be transferred to those that receive the subsidies. It's not that hard to understand: if you redistribute 10% of total wealth from the top quartile to the bottom quartile for 1% in additional total growth, then even if that additional growth went completely to the top quartile, it would be a net -9% of total wealth for them. I don't say that's a bad thing per se. But it doesn't help to willfully ignore that fact.

Edit: I just now got the part "If the increase in cake size is bigger than the subsidies" – that's a ridiculous assumption. EU total growth in 2025 was 1.5% or 295 billion USD. From 2021-2027, the EU budget committed roughly 370bn € each for Agriculture subsidies and for Cohesion Policies, totaling 720bn € over 7 years; 2025 has seen ~130bn USD from those two buckets alone. Germany alone has paid another 60bn in subsidies the same year. Oh, and there has been a total of 417bn USD in energy subsidies in europe in 2023 (most recent data available). Even if we could attribute all total growth to subsidies alone, we'd have a factor below 0.5 – and that doesn't include any growth through private investmen, PPP, or any kind of increase of regular public spending.

I think what matters is the size of (for example) the German economy with and without the EU.

Futhermore, what matter is the amount of tax collected by the EU. Energy subsidy is not money collected by the EU and distributed.

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