Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
That would probably be a diary. What hits the average citizen most is the local reality. Communal taxation on property was abolished in toto by Berlusconi as a demagogic move. Prodi had actually waived them only for single property owners below a certain income. Berlusconi extended it to himself and took credit. This forced the municipal administrations to slash costs, services, etc, and raise prices on community services. The Tremonti austerity packages masked as reform further burdened citizens with costs in health and education that simply didn't exist before.  Then there were tax exemptions for the Church and far too many "non-profit" organizations. Further, Tremonti progressively abolished a lot of small tax exemptions for the average citizen while privileging the rich. It's perceived as unfair that in order to send kids to a public school, a family has to fork out payments to supplement an education that was a right before the so-called Gelmini reform and cannot deduct these costs, while the rich can send their kids to private Catholic schools and write it off. I'll leave this as a summary without further detail.

Breadbaskets for calculating inflation indexes become obsolete. It's a way of gaming the stats and hiding actual inflation. There have been popular campaigns to deride this tactic. No one buys national cigarettes or eats ciriola bread anymore.

by de Gondi (publiobestia aaaatttthotmaildaughtusual) on Wed Jan 11th, 2012 at 04:07:55 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Others have rated this comment as follows:

Display:

Top Diaries

Occasional Series