For a true European democracy: There can be no true European democracy without an autonomous EU fiscal power
Historically, the creation of fiscal power has coincided with the founding act of a political community, and has required strong democratic control over who wields it; hence democratic societies have always required fiscal power to be exercised by parliament. Today, the attribution of fiscal power to the European Parliament (together with the Council of the European Union, under the ordinary legislative procedure) is an indispensable condition for building an effective and fully democratic European Union.
At present, the EU budget depends on the will of the individual member states. On the revenue side, Article 311 TFEU stipulates that the system of own resources shall be decided by the Council unanimously and that the decision shall then be approved by the individual Member States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements. In this procedure, the representative body of the citizens - the European Parliament - is only consulted and each government retains the right of veto on the issue of resources transferred and then used by the EU budget.
This financing mechanism must be reformed so that the European Union has the autonomous capacity to levy European taxes directly on businesses and citizens without going through prior harmonisation of national taxes and therefore without the intervention of national budgets.
