Financial Times
September 7, 2011
The European Union should appoint a new budget tsar with powers to dictate taxes and spending in eurozone countries and who could ultimately adjudicate whether countries should be kicked out of the euro, the Dutch prime minister has argued.
Writing in the Financial Times, Mark Rutte and his government’s finance minister, Jan Kees de Jager, said the new “commissioner for budgetary discipline” should be given the authority to impose a gradually more painful series of penalties on profligate eurozone countries, including the withholding of EU development funds.
But if a country continues to flout EU demands for spending restraint, Mr Rutte’s plan would force eurozone countries to submit their budgets to the commissioner, who could veto it before it is presented to parliament. Over the long term, Mr Rutte said, the eurozone should force countries to leave the euro if it did not abide by the commissioner’s ruling.
“Countries that do not want to submit to this regime can choose to leave the eurozone,” Mr Rutte and Mr de Jager write. “In the future, the ultimate sanction can be to force countries to leave the euro.”
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Read the article by Mark Rutte and Jan Kees de Jager
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