Government waste

Some people would have you believe that scaling back the government would save us soo much money that we could all afford a private jet.

In reality we have seen that while the government wastes disproportionally per capita, it's not that significant. If we trust the efficiency per capita metric proposed there, we can simulate how much money we would save if we got down to the level of another country.

If we following the example of Netherlands, we would save approximately 4.0 Billion Euro.

To put it into perspective - this is how it compares to the deficit

A significant saving to be sure, not very realistic with all complications in Belgium, but not enough to get us to a net surplus.

Parliament wages

The website politicalsalaries.com provides data on the renumeration of members of parliament, which we can compare to the average bruto wage. While this won't include a bunch of tax advantaged benefits, the plot suggests that these wages are far from excessive.