A month before the general election in Germany, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has broken the taboo of admitting that Greece will need a third bailout when the current one runs out in 2014.This was the stark unwelcome news that headed the online EU Observer item underlining the fact that Europe is still very far from being financially out of the woods and, of course, indicating that we must gird our own loins to meet yet another onslaught on our hard-earned and limited financial caches.

Since then, the ECB has taken it upon itself to contradict Schaeuble and declare that no decision regarding Greece will be taken till next spring. However, the writing is on the wall, loud and clear.

I am quite sure that had we known that we would be bailing out countries like Greece when the Yes for Europe campaign was raging, nobody in their right mind would have voted to join the EU; despite the fact that the alternative, partnership, seemed as much of a pie in the sky then as it does now, along with the mythical Switzerland in the Mediterranean concept.

What we did not have then and certainly do not have now is a third option. None exists.

Have you not noticed that, since joining the EU, your spending power has been drastically reduced? If you haven’t, you must be one of those lucky few whose income far exceeds the income threshold that attracts the maximum 35 per cent.

It is therefore relative to surmise that it is not the percentage that is at fault in our fiscal system but the commensurate thresholds that literally bleed the average salary earner and pensioner white. It is always Mr Average who is targeted to finance the colossal maintenance bills for of free education and free healthcare, let alone the bailing out of recalcitrant fellow EU countries in a financial abyss like Greece.

I am no financier. Despite my 29 years working for banks, I harbour not the slightest delusion in that direction. However, what I do know is this: a one-size-fits-all financial package translates into a simple what is one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

It is the subtle imposition of a lifestyle that has gone belly up

What is excellent in Denmark or Germany may not necessarily suit Spain or Malta, for that matter. Lifestyles are different and financial mores are diametrically opposed. A book written about Italian unification, called The Viceroys, by Federico di Roberto, illustrates most clearly that the imposition of Piedmontese laws of succession and fiscal practice on the hitherto latifundian Kingdom of the Two Sicilies spelled its financial ruin.

What suited Piedmont admirably was a total disaster in Naples and Palermo wherein the too rapid fragmentation of the great estates, in particular, the dissolution of the abbeys, convents and monasteries, turned the age-old system upside down in a seismic convulsion that was replaced by rampant corruption and mafia, malaises from which the ex Bourbon Kingdom has not yet recovered from.

The Viceroys was written at the beginning of the last century and, strangely, although Giuseppe di Lampedusa disparaged the Roberto book as being based on backstairs gossip, his description in The Leopard, completed in the 1950s, of the meeting between the feudal Sicilian Prince of Salina and the constitutional Piedmontese Conte de Chevalley also reflects the same negative attitude to the utterly disastrous one-size-fits-all policy that had been imposed on the newly-minted Kingdom of Italy after unification.

It is easy to see that what the EU has brought in its train was VAT; not a bad policy by any means and one which, I am sure, was devised to ensure that the central government was assured of practically a guaranteed and constant income. Eighteen per cent on anything we consume is pretty high for starters. However, this levy is harnessed with income tax and national insurance; all very well and good as long as things are going swimmingly but a terrible yoke when things are not.

In my book of earthy logic, should Mr Average’s spending power be increased, income from VAT will escalate and will, I am sure, in the long run, far exceed income that is gleaned, painfully via provisional tax and NIF.

There is nothing more successful in good financial practice than the ‘feel good’ factor when people are convinced that they can safely improve their standard of living in the comforting knowledge that the money will continue flowing in. That was precisely the spell cast by the late lamented George Bonello Dupuis, who was a dab hand at this sort of thing, in the 1990s which, despite our not yet being in the EU, created an almost Utopian Malta wherein growth and prosperity became the order of day.

It was precisely this growth and prosperity, coupled by political and fiscal stability, which were, to the conscious voter, the spurs to vote to join the EU. Sadly, the expected magic did not materialise.

Have I become a Eurosceptic? I don’t think so.

There are plenty of political, social and cultural benefits that Malta is beginning to enjoy once it has gotten the hang of milking the bureaucratic systems, albeit Byzantine, devised by Brussels to keep armies of pen pushers (or rather button-stabbers) gainfully employed.

It is the subtle imposition of a lifestyle that simply does not suit Mediterraneans like us that has gone belly up. Remove or revamp income tax and replace it by VAT income that will, once individual spending power is boosted, far exceed income tax.

Create a fairer welfare state that will only tax super-high income earners and, yes, if we want to save Malta environmentally, identify vacant properties that are being held for speculative purposes and tax them.

In that way, Malta will be in a far better position to bail out Greece next year without too many tears.

Kenneth Zammit Tabona is Artistic Director of the Valletta International Baroque Festival.

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