The British are leaving! The British are leaving!

Posted on June 26, 2016

You have to feel for the Brit’s in THEIR quest for independence.  The recent Brexit vote was significant.  Stay with the EU for short term stability and long term dependence or leave for the sake of independence and ensure a rash of short term challenges while impacting almost the entire planet.  Anyone in the US with a 401K felt a bit of a jolt with the recent vote to bolt.

So why did they leave?  Despite a number of articles in the Sunday, 6/26/16 edition of the Washington Post on the impact of the vote to leave, there was an interesting article on the motivating factors entitled “7 reasons why some Europeans hate the E.U.”  After reading the article it should have been called “7 reasons Europeans should hate the E.U.”  The following are those seven, excerpted from the article.

1.  Pay for E.U. Bureaucrats.  EU employees get paid generous wages with special, minimal taxes.  In 2014, many mid-level EU workers made more than David Cameron, the British Prime Minister.  That’d be like having our own Congress voting on their own raises and exempting themselves from the laws they write.  Oh wait, never mind.
2. Wasteful Travel.  The EU operates out of Brussels, but the European Parliament can only meet in full session in Strasbourg, France, once a month requiring 10,000 EU staff, lobbyists and journalists to travel there.  Imagine if “Congress could only pass laws one week a month – and it needed to do it in Cleveland.”
3. Overreaching Regulation.  An example is legislation on how curved a banana can be. Let’s call that one Brexit bolts over bent banana brouhaha.
4. Lack of Accountability.  Decisions are made behind closed doors.  After all no one wants to see sausage made… or as we call it in the US, health care laws. Remember “we have to vote for it to know what’s in it.”?
5. Ignoring Rejections from Voters.  Apparently if the EU doesn’t get what it wants through the ballot box, it just goes ahead and does it anyway.  An example of this was the Lisbon Treaty that implemented many changes  originally voted down in France and the Netherlands.
6. A Babylon of Costly Translations. There are 24 official languages within the EU and nearly every EU document must be translated into all 24.  It takes over 5000 people to pull that off.  Although reading between the lines is only required in 12 languages.
7. Unnecessary Bureaucracy.  Every EU member gets a full compliment of agencies to weigh down the system.  But if you think about it, it’s not surprising.  Telling all of those countries how they must conduct themselves couldn’t be cheap.

All of these makes a very compelling argument for bailing out of EU’s version of a one-world nation.  Of course you might not have known that unless you dug down to page 13 at the bottom half of the page to find the article.  The Sunday Washington Post ran out room on it’s cover with it’s in-depth coverage of Obama impersonators.