The budget of the EU parliament? What do you mean? The budget of the parliament was about 740k€ in 2022.
Did you mean the budget of the EU itself? It's about what you said (180B€ in 2022). Of course, that doesn't account for individual member States' budgets. The EU's budget is dwarfed by the aggregate of all members' budgets, and it is lower than most of the big EU countries' budgets.
Did you mean 740k EUR per person? I can't find the whole budget right now, but it costs EU parliament over 100 million just to move it back and forth between Brussels and Strasbourg (which is totally pointless and is only done so that France can feel important). They also apparently spend 1 billion per year on translators.
EDIT: I guess I offended some French people, hence the downvotes :)
> In [2014], the European Court of Auditors (ECA) carried out a further analysis of the potential savings if all meetings were held in Brussels, following a request from the Parliament. Their estimate of the cost of the monthly move is 113.800.000 euro.
> They also apparently spend 1 billion per year on translators.
Now that the UK is out of the Union, it would be nice for sanity to prevail and most of those translators be made redundant. Except for drafting official multi-language legal documents, the bulk of the proceedings can go on in English, and EMPs that require translation services should request them from their own countries.
EU publishes tons of written material, and basically all of it has to be translated. Costs for translating the proceedings are very likely less than 1% of total costs for translation.
> EU publishes tons of written material, and basically all of it has to be translated.
But only legislative text needs to have translated versions officially recognized as equivalent. The rest can be produced and published in English, and member countries can translate them as required, if necessary. It's a huge expense that exists only to placate French linguistic nationalism.
Well, Imagine your government (the EU is not far off of being one) is now handling everything in spanish, even though your country speaks english and english is your official language. Lets be generous and there are only about 10% of people not speaking spanish. Is it really ok that there are official documents, meeting notes, publications, advertisements,web sites, videos etc in spanish and only the most important ones get translated to your language?
For companies this would completely fine. For a government this is not.
Apart from that, there is right now a huge source of text that is publicly available and already translated into the same X languages, with a huge quality to boost. People have teached ML translators with that text source. Ofc this is just a side effect but these translations have made other translations and communication in the EU a bit more simple just by being such a big reference.
> EDIT: I guess I offended some French people, hence the downvotes :)
Yes.
But I have to recognise, they could - at least - hand out "free" train tickets to most of the Parliament staff. Not just between Brussels and Strasbourg, but everywhere in the EU.
> Approximately 94% of the EU budget funds programmes and projects both within member states and outside the EU. Less than 7% of the budget is used for administrative costs, and less than 3% is spent on EU civil servants' salaries.
Negotiate trade agreements for the second largest market in the world. Make harmonised law and regulations and operate the courts associated. Finance infrastructure projects and the development of the poorest members. Manage various cooperation efforts between members in sector like education.
EU needs to do a better job at showing how useful it is, where the money goes and so on, so that people stop having this vague idea of what EU is and does, and start seeing the benefits. Should do a good job at reducing the number of eurosceptics.
Funny. I just heard literally the opposite complain a couple hours ago: that the EU advertisements are getting obnoxious. Virtually every single infrastructure project that is even partially financed by a EU agency shows all the appropriate logos almost everywhere.
Ha, I can see why; I work in an institute that receives funds from time to time for infrastructure enhancements and large projects. We have those logos scattered throughout some equipment, hanging in rooms, etc. It's far from intrusive, though. I would rather see a sign that says "EU helped pay for this" than product placement, if I'm being candid.
If you're interested, there's a fascinating book called Life of a European Mandarin that provides an insider view and manages to be entertainingly written despite being about the incredibly dry work the EU does. It gives a vivid glimpse into how hard and tedious it is to accomplish things that are obvious wins like harmonizing trivial differences in laws across borders. You would expect it to be the kind of book you have to force yourself to finish, and there are certainly moments like that, but overall it reads more like a guilty pleasure, and I highly recommend it. It gave me respect for that kind of work and also makes me very glad I chose a different profession.
if you would actually visit (not only) poorer parts of EU, you would find entire new roads built or repaired completely by EU funds. Parks created, playgrounds built, many many useful things for common population. Companies can apply for various funds ie to get more eco-friendly.
Its true that some of it gets stolen by local corruption but overall this is the source of many good things that folks can actually see around them, in places that wouldn't get any otherwise.
[1082B for 2014-2020, 4B/1082B*6y~2.2%]
A loss of 4B is a decrease of revenue by 1.5% for google.
[googles revenue was 256B in 2021 4/256~1.5%]