Community Resource

They are after your money again:

EU finance commissioner Joaquin Almunia announced on Tuesday that he supports boosting the union's budget from a new EU tax, which would also give greater autonomy and room for manoeuvre to EU institutions.

Greater room for manoevre to organisations whose accounts are dodgy seems like a retrograde step to me, but then I am old fashioned. He then demonstrated his level of understanding of democratic accountability: The commissioner said that such a fiscal instrument, which he preferred to call a "community

resource" rather than "community tax", would have to conceal the origin of money collected from individual member states, to avoid the constant fighting over net and gross cash balance.

So roughly translated: We want your cash, we don't want you to be aware of how much we are taking and we want to choose what to spend it on.