This Sounds A Bit Pie In The Sky

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I have just read this (don’t miss the photo):

Constitution, enlargement and budget: Austria hopes to revive Europe with these themes and infuse it with “energy and confidence” when it takes over the rotating presidency of the European Union on January 1

Am I reading this aright, he says, scratching the dust from his sleep-ridden eyes. Aren’t the constitution, enlargement and the budget three themes which are absolutely guaranteed not to inspire enthusiasm just at the moment (unfortunately)?

As usual the FT takes me back to the hard world of reality:

Austria intends to make the fight against fraud in value added tax a cornerstone of its European Union presidency, in an effort to end billions of euros of losses in annual revenues at a time of stretched national budgets.

Ah, yes, this sounds much more like it.

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".