Mr President, given that this is a joint debate, I will point out that my mandate is restricted to the report by Mrs Peijs. Mr President, it is customary for draftspeople of the opinion to congratulate the rapporteur of the committee responsible, to express their agreement and satisfaction, and to try to highlight their contributions and/or to at least expand on a few points. Unfortunately, I will not be able to continue that practice today. On behalf of the Committee on Budgets, which I have the honour of representing institutionally, I must express the profound disappointment of my committee at the treatment by the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of our amendments, and please do not interpret this as in any way a personal opinion. The Committee on Budgets adopted its opinion unanimously while I was absent through illness. I was not even there at the final moment to defend my proposals and the opinion was therefore adopted without interference. There was not a single vote against and there was therefore no distinction of a party political nature. This is in no way a party political issue for us. The majority of members of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, however, has rejected our amendments en masse. Unless I am mistaken, not a single one of our amendments has warranted the approval of that majority in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs. And we in the Committee on Budgets have the feeling, Mr President, that constructive and purely institutional contributions have been thoroughly spurned and scorned. To be frank, we can find no explanation for this systematic negative vote. Ladies and gentlemen, it is true that the Commission document which is the basis of our discussion focused, shall we say, on national budgets. But when the Committee on Budgets added the Community dimension, the Commission, in particular the Commissioner present, thanked us for it and expressed its appreciation of this widening of the perspective of the Communication. Well, the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs has refused to open its eyes to this additional dimension. Why? Why does the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs deny that the European Union’s meagre budget, 1.07% of Community GDP, has been applied just as rigorously as that of the Member States? By rejecting Amendment No 7, this is what they have done. It is also difficult for we budgeteers in this House to understand why, two days from the first reading of the 2001 budget, the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs denies, by rejecting Amendments Nos 5 and 6, the multiplier effect of Community expenditure and the fact that it frequently acts as an example for national, regional and local authorities. If that is the economic thinking of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, the coherent thing for it to do would be to withdraw all the amendments it has presented to the draft budget. That would be the most logical thing for it to do. Ladies and gentlemen, 90 days from the physical introduction of the euro, any inkling of fiscal policy in relation to the Community budget is being sidestepped. From the point of view of the Committee on Budgets, the obvious thing to do would be to gradually strengthen the European budget and go beyond mere – necessary, but mere – coordination of the economic policies of the Member States. Some day, just as we now have a ‘Mr’ CFSP, we are convinced that we will need a ‘Mrs’ Euro, perhaps Mrs Peijs herself, and a greater European budget, in exchange for a reduction of national budgets. And in the Committee on Budgets we wonder how the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs thinks economic cycles, symmetrical and asymmetrical shocks, should be confronted, each one as it comes or all of them in a coordinated and cooperative fashion, to a certain extent using the Community budget to this end. We in the Committee on Budgets, which I would remind you approved the opinion unanimously, have the impression that for the majority of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs ideological prejudices carried more weight than the objective assessment of the economic options available. Please allow me to remind you, as a teacher of public economy, Milton Freedman, said, that we are all Post-Keynesians. He forgot about that majority of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of this Parliament. The motion for a resolution is only Post-Keynesian in a chronological sense, but the basis of its thinking is pre-Keynesian. It takes up elements of the monetarism of the 80s and 90s without taking account of its background. When the Maastricht Treaty was signed, perhaps all politicians, and certainly the economists, knew that we should get rid of the systematic deficit, that we needed a policy of financial rationalisation, but we also knew, since the 60s, that budgetary balance is only advisable in certain circumstances and conditions and that, in general, strict budgetary balance tends to be procyclic, that is to say that it tends to aggravate the cyclic tendency of the economy. Kennedy’s advisers, if I may go back that far, illustrated, by means of the so-called budget surplus of full employment, how a balanced budget, even in certain cases of deficit, can create recession. I would therefore ask you, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of my committee, to take a more open perspective, as contained in our amendments, and to include them tomorrow in the text of the resolution.

Political group: PSE