Europe’s Digital Decade: digital targets for 2030
Speaking as someone who runs a B2C IT company in Europe, what would really help is:<p>- Standard for English language education across the continent, so that I can hire someone from another country without their children being denied an education because they don&#x27;t speak an obscure local language<p>- Set and enforce standards for apartment ventilation, noise insulation, and air pollution, since in many Eastern European countries workers are suffering in sub-standard apartments (including new ones) when trying to work from home.<p>- Get rid of all payroll taxes, increase the pension age to 70 (or privatise pensions) in order to fund this change. I can&#x27;t hire a &#x27;rockstar programmer&#x27; with a good salary if 50%+ of the labour budget is swallowed by taxes for him and me (instead I will just hire him as a B2B freelancer, which is not something that is scalable, and presents him with an additional compliance burden).<p>- Reduce sales taxes across the bloc to the legal minimum - 16% - in order to encourage sales to EU customers (instead of American or Chinese customers, where a sale is much more rewarding due to their lower sales tax rates)<p>- Get rid of the endless series of grants and handouts which reward the companies best at filling out forms and justify the huge EU bureaucracy, instead of those companies best at actually selling products that people and businesses want. (Use these savings to cut VAT)<p>- Rollback or simplify cookie popup warnings, GDPR, to reduce the compliance burden.<p>- Increase border security, and disincentivise&#x2F;punish&#x2F;reverse irregular immigration flows, in order to reduce the welfare burden on states, and increase the price of manual labour - to incentivise AI and automation. (For example, huge sections of farmland in southern Europe [1] are worked by irregular migrants, for illegal wages and without rights, reducing the incentive to automate these operations - contacts that would go to EU tech companies).<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dw.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;spains-sea-of-plastic-where-europe-gets-its-produce-migrants-get-exploited&#x2F;a-47824476" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dw.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;spains-sea-of-plastic-where-europe-get...</a>