Jul 10, 2016

Bret Stephens on Brexit and the EU bureaucracy

The EU's bureaucratic arm - the Council and the Commission - employs about 33,000 civil servants. The U.K.'s civil service has 410,000 employees, not counting an additional four million public-sector workers. The EU's budget last year came to less than $160 billion, divided among 28 countries. Britain's was $1.15 trillion.

If there's a superstate, it's in Westminster, not Brussels. And the EU, despite its countless flaws, is not some colossal squid crushing the U.K. in its powerful tentacles.

[...]

A British taxpayer making over £43,000 ($57,000) pays a crushing tax rate of 40%, along with a 20% VAT on every item he purchases. The average wait time for an operation with the National Health Service is 10 weeks. The energy bill for an average British household jumped by 30% between 2011 and 2015, mainly to support David Cameron's green-energy fixation.

These problems are British, not EU-made.

~ Bret Stephens, "Of Trumpkins and Brexiteers," The Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2016

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