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by harywilke 798 days ago
It still boggles my mind that it's not obvious how much of my tax bill go to the EU. This aids in the feeling of detachment.
3 comments

Does this chart [1] for contributions and this [2] for net contributions (direct financial contributions minus direct financial benefits) not answer that question?

Then just figure out which portion of your countries budget comes out of your taxes, and how big the total budget of your country is, and you have your answer. It's not like this is top secret information

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/316691/eu-budget-contrib...

2: https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...

It's more like "I can't be bothered to look, but I can be bothered to complain".
Basically nothing.

They get 1% of VAT which is mostly spent on poor regions (cohesion funding) and agricultural subsidies (Common Agricultural Policy).

With the EU having a total €150B budget in a €19.350B GDP economy it's probably still noise in your total taxes.
I can't help thinking that you must have the decimal point in the wrong place...
Or else they are European and use . as the thousands separator.
I wondered if that might be the case, but they're writing in English which use a comma as a thousands separator; in which case, they definitely have the decimal point in the wrong place, even if it's down to a grammatical error.
I see many Europeans write in English but still use European number formatting - they are sort of different things.
I'm not so sure they're separate, or at least that they should be treated as such. Either way, it's a shame that this isn't standardised, regardless of the language spoken. Likewise units of measurement (weight, distance, time etc.).
Just had a look: 25 of EU countries use ".", and 2 (Malta and Ireland) use ","
In school (UK) we were told to use ' as the thousands separator in mathematics as it avoids confusion i.e.

1'234.56 1'234,56

Either of these can be understood no matter which format you're used to. Although, I don't think it's ever caught on really (or whether it's even advisable/sensible).

When was this?
That's how it's done in Europe. . not ,