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Trump Threatens to Double Spanish Tariffs Over NATO Spending (www.bloomberg.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

28 comments fedilink hide all child comments

President Donald Trump criticized Spain for not agreeing to new defense spending targets adopted by NATO and suggested the country could face tariffs twice as high from the US.
Trump stated that the US is negotiating a trade deal with Spain and threatened to make them pay twice as much, which caused Spain's benchmark stock index to extend its losses.
Spanish officials dismissed Trump's tariff threat, emphasizing that the European Commission handles trade matters for the EU and that individual member states don't negotiate trade deals on their own.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 days ago (26 children)

5% of GDP is often 40-50% of the countries federal budgets.

This is completely insane and it only serves to bankroll the US MIC into a new era of record profits.
It is unsustainable and will destroy economic growth as crucial infrastructure investments will fall short and it will create even more political instability and Fascism as it will be financed through cutting social security and investments and rising taxes on the lower and middle class.

As this is economically unsustainable there is only one solution while keeping this spending up. Recover some of the money spent by actually using the weapons to seize resources of foreign countries by war.

Last but not least a lot of the systems bought from the US could come with a kill switch so it will effectively being EU paying for renting US weapons that only work according to US interests.

Spain is the only country with some sense in this.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (8 children)

Spain's budget is ~21% of its gdp (with >10% unemployment you can imagine how bad they fucking bleed us with taxes, the poor I mean, for the rich is the same as anywhere else), but more than half of it goes to pensions, and we have a huge ,dense, and expensive bureaucracy that takes a good chunk of the rest (I don't have numbers sorry).

So, I think you are right, there's just no more money: touching the pensions is political suicide (and very unfair), scaling down bureaucracy is just impossible, rising taxes would suffocate us (even more), taxing the rich is as much of a fairy tale as it is in any other country...

On top of that, if you read a history book you will see that the Spanish military is a much bigger threat for Spain than the Russian. I don't think it's in the best interest of the Spanish people to give them more money.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I think it is important to note, if the social security is considered part of the budget or not. For instance in Germany it is not, however social security contributions cannot cover the rising pensions, so the German federal budget cross finances the pension fund heavily.