Ever Wondered How the EU Can Blow So Much Money? Just Look at a Eurocrat's Pay Packet

Rainer Holznagel, the president of the German Taxpayers Federation, went public in an attack on EU civil servants in an article in Die Welt am Sonntag, published on Sunday. Holznagel claimed that the roughly 46,000 Eurocrats (who oversee the growing tyranny that the European Union inflicts upon the citizens of its 27 member states) enjoy incomes far in excess of their national equivalents.

Thousands, it appears, achieve income levels far above national leaders, cabinet members and state secretaries.

The article does not go into detail on their subsequent pensions, presumably as this is an area still shrouded in considerable secrecy. This writer, decades ago, was informed by a Brussels insider that the pension scheme was surreptitiously inserted into an early accession treaty in the knowledge, I presumed, that it would be unlikely to be spotted.

Nevertheless, even without the obscenity of their nationally untaxed pensions, there is surely enough in this article to enrage millions across our austerity-wracked and incompetently governed so-called "community of nations". Try these two revealing paragraphs:

It gets better for the 79 civil servants who are EU general directors. After four years in office, such a position for a person without children and who is based in Brussels, earns €21,310.17 monthly - that even surpasses German President Joachim Gauck's €18,083 monthly.

EU civil servants do not pay the national income tax of their home country but pay it directly to the EU - and those rates are relatively moderate, with payments for social services running at 13.3 percent of a base salary. Tax rates are moderate too and there is a limited progression, so if you make more not much more gets taken away.

There is a very telling point that emerges from these facts. It may not be immediately obvious but is straightforward once grasped. This is that the Eurocrats concerned must have been aware that the institution they were in the process of constructing contained the seeds of its own destruction. These were intelligent men and women, far above risking their careers and pensions upon the whims of any electorate. Someday their scheming would inevitably have been found out. They thus chose to make hay while the sun shone!

The thunderclouds are now, however, gathering; the EU Project, as they must have foreseen, is doomed in its present form and attacks such as that carried out by Holznagel must surely and thankfully only hasten its demise.

Martin Cole runs several politically themed blogs, mainly Ironies Too, and tweets and comments almost unceasingly about the erosions of our liberties.