Neil Williams wrote:
On 2016-07-17 08:45:12 +0000, Recliner said:

Many of the woes of the Club Med EU members are because of their membership
of the euro at unrealistic exchange rates, not the EU. The EU has probably
been widened a bit too much, but it is the Eurozone that has been extended
to far too many countries. If the rules for entry were more stringent, and
extremely strict, Italy, Spain and Greece, and maybe even France, would not
have been allowed, let alone forced, to join. So a Eurozone with perhaps
half a dozen Northern European members would probably have worked well, and
a few more EU countries might have been motivated to run their economies
better with the motivation to join. But there would never be 18 members.

TBH I think the Euro has run its course - cards are widely accepted and
money is easily converted - and I'm fairly strongly of the view that
the ability to devalue the Pound has saved us going the same way as
Greece on a number of occasions. I'm surprised it did survive the
Greek issue - but I doubt it will survive all that much longer, and nor
really should it.

The euro won't fade away just because of cashless retail activities. The
point of it is to lock countries into fixed exchange rates, which is
inherently unstable if they don't have converged economies. So a currency
zone with just Germany and its immediate neighbours might be stable in the
long term; one that combines Germany, Italy and Greece was obviously
unstable from the beginning, but the euro idealists forced it through
anyway.

There were quite a few such idealists in the UK, but luckily they were
frustrated in their moves to include us in the eurozone. So we, uniquely,
had the perfect form of EU membership, now discarded:

- Permanently out of the eurozone, with our interests safeguarded
- Permanently out of Schengen
- Reduced (rebated) membership fees
- But full membership of the single market nevertheless.

From
http://ukandeu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Who-pays-for-the-EU-and-how-much-does-it-cost-the-UK-Disentangling-fact-from-fiction-in-the-EU-Budget-Professor-Iain-Begg.pdf

- Spending by the EU in 2014 was around 1% of the Gross National Income
(GNI) of the Union. In the same year, the US federal government spent some
twenty times as much.
- The UK is a major contributor to the EU budget because it is one of the
four largest economies in the EU, but has consistently paid less than
France (since 1985) and (latterly) Italy, let alone Germany.
- As a share of gross national income, the UK pays the least of all
Member States into the EU budget,principally because of the UK rebate,
implemented since 1985.