The EU's Spending Explodes

 by Thomas Kolbe

Brussels’ budget negotiations are entering the home stretch. Ireland wants to put the brakes on Ursula von der Leyen’s spending frenzy, at least a little. That is not enough for the German chancellor. Europe’s well-known king of debt is playing the fiscal disciplinarian, putting on yet another media performance for the public.

Ursula von der Leyen has big plans for your money. The money and savings of your children are also attracting considerable interest among the circles of the European Commission in Brussels.

The plan of Brussels’ uncrowned queen is this: starting in 2028, the Commission’s annual budget is to rise from its current €170 billion to €285 billion -- a hefty increase of 68 percent. Von der Leyen wants to round things off at two trillion euros over seven years. The race looks like this: China has a five-year plan. Europe’s central planners are not merely catching up; they are adding another two years. Planning certainty may no longer apply to taxpayers, entrepreneurs, or even employees in the private sector, but for bureaucrats and the self-reproducing armies of civil servants, it remains the lifeblood of the system.

Let us be frank: an increase of almost 70 percent from one financial framework to the next is not merely a budget expansion. This fiscal megalomania conceals a systemic transformation. Brussels sees itself as responsible for everything. A military union is to be created. Europe wants to project power with greater force in the future.

The next phase of the green transformation will also come at a steep price: some €700 billion is to flow into the channels of the green extraction machine.

The latest business idea from Brussels’ redistribution experts, the enforcers of the subsidy economy, is to store captured CO2 beneath the seabed of the North and Baltic Seas. It takes a special kind of imagination to come up with something like that.

The project requires the construction of an entire infrastructure of pipelines, transport services, specialized loading ports, and complex drilling technology to inject the gas into depleted oil and gas reservoirs. Here, the future of our children is being sacrificed to fill the pockets of subsidy hunters and political favorites. A disgrace for this continent.

The EU’s military budget is supposed to grow to €131 billion over the seven-year period. As everyone knows, the war-hungry enemy in the East is merely waiting for the right moment to descend upon the countries of the West, seize the payments made by the German and French welfare systems, and then exploit their rich energy reserves and mineral resources.

One almost has to resort to irony to comment on this undeniable absurdity: a state-like structure being built above the euro-area countries themselves.

Decisive weeks lie ahead for the budget. In recent days, the Irish presidency of the EU Council has proposed cutting Brussels’ budget by €141 billion. That would mean roughly €20 billion less per year, or about eight percent less than the Commission’s original proposal. Even so, the budget would still expand by more than 55 percent.

This is not a proposal for austerity. It is a media stunt that solves neither the structural problems of the budget and the European Commission nor the problem of ever-rising contributions from member states to the EU debt club.

For the German chancellor, the Irish proposal was unacceptable. Friedrich Merz has something much bigger in mind. During his months in office, the man has acquired a reputation as a serious, honorable leader drilled in fiscal discipline. He now expects proposals to cut the EU budget by several hundred billion euros. At first, he kept secret where he intended to apply the sharp scalpel of his supposedly Alemannic fiscal discipline.

But jokes aside: based on bitter experience with this antagonist of the truth, we must conclude that he will, of course, support the European Commission’s plan to expand the power base of Brussels’ central planners. Higher national contributions are part of that plan. Germany, which will pay around €43 billion in gross contributions to the EU this year, would have to reckon with an annual financial burden rising by as much as 70 percent. That seems a little steep for a country in economic free fall.

There is more. Merz lets every new Brussels levy pass without objection. Whether it is the CO2 extraction mechanism or the new plastics levy, Berlin has not a word of criticism to offer. There is no advocate left for the German taxpayer, far and wide.

We are witnessing the chancellor’s familiar media camouflage: political theater straight out of the 1990s. He pretends to defend fiscal discipline, poses as the taxpayer’s advocate, and demands cuts to a budget plan that has already been inflated in advance. It is outrageous to assume that the people of this country are so stupid.

Merz conceals Brussels’ dishonest reality because it so strikingly resembles his own political career. Month after month, the European Commission, represented by its Directorate-General for Budget, turns up in the European capital markets to raise fresh credit through bond issues. This year alone, around €180 billion in fresh fiat credit is flowing into Ursula von der Leyen’s coffers. This credit -- backed collectively by the member states, despite such a practice being officially ruled out and prohibited -- is financing the whole circus. Sometimes it takes the form of gigantic wind farms in some of Europe’s most beautiful landscapes; sometimes, it is loss-making offshore wind parks; now, it is a pipeline system for the pointless transportation of CO2. These projects disfigure the landscape, drain capital markets of funds that could finance productive investment, and inflict wounds on Europe’s economy, society, and landscape that will not heal in our lifetimes.

According to his official position, Friedrich Merz rejects this practice of collective borrowing through Eurobonds. We must therefore assume that behind closed doors, the chancellor is one of its strongest advocates. He was presumably particularly pleased by the issuance of Next Generation EU, the €800 billion spectacle launched five years ago. After all, government debt is always good debt, no matter which artificial level of Europe’s hyperstructure it happens to be incurred on.

With this fiat money, socialists such as Pedro Sánchez in Spain finance parts of the pension system -- a vulgar exercise in buying votes with other people’s money. Taxpayers will have to foot the bill, and consumers will have no choice but to pay their share of this political profligacy through the inflation it generates. In August of last year, Brussels transferred more than €23 billion to Madrid, including €16 billion in loans.

A further €6.23 billion arrived in August of this year. Spain has received €78 billion in total so far. Italy, too, receives its share every year to help stabilize its budget.

Soon, repayment will fall due on the debt raised through Eurobonds. If Brussels wants to prevent a crash in national budgets, it will be forced to issue successor bonds. Whether it can then use financial repression to compel banks, investors, and private savers to buy official Eurobonds, or instead offer bonds at attractive interest rates that the market willingly takes up, no longer makes much difference. The European debt club has already struck the iceberg in the bond market. The only people left on the bridge of this doomed ship are the last political adventurers, so intoxicated by their own lust for power that they have failed to notice they have set the final chapter of their own story in motion.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/the-eu-s-spending-explodes/