Payment and Privileges
On the one hand, the European Parliament is expensive, not least because of the costs of translating documents and interpreting debates into 21 languages. Thus, the 2009 budget of the parliament accounts a yearly total cost of more than 1 Mio Eur per member of parliament. and the total cost of the parliament adds up to approximately 1.5 billion euros per year. On the other hand, as this cost is shared by over 500 million citizens of 27 countries, the cost per taxpayer is less than that of national parliaments.
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