The Political Bear

Oops, the outgoing Italian government recently published everyone’s earnings on a website! This might be the worst thing that I have ever heard, and that is coming from someone who has had their salary published. When you are a Senate or House Staffer you salary is published two times a year, and anyone can have access to those documents. The main difference– that was a public job. In Italy they released everyones salaries, causing a voyeuristic frenzy only previously known in the public sector to find out what their Italian neighbor was claiming as income.

There has been outrage in Italy after the outgoing government published every Italian’s declared earnings and tax contributions on the internet.

A slightly more disurbing twist on the story is a quote by Italy’s Deputy Economic Minister, Vincenzo Visco, stating that he was surprised by the uproar because everyone knows that this sort of transparency is normal. That in itself, while wrong, is not that disturbing, what is disturbing is that he believed it was normal because he has seen it on American Soap Operas.

“I can’t understand what the problem is,” he is quoted as telling Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper.

“This already exists all around the world, you just have to watch any American soap to see that. We had the system ready by January but we delayed publication to avoid arguments during the election campaign.”

I still have a lot to learn about life, but for the record: I do not base my view of Afghanistan, or other middle eastern countries based on terrorist training videos.

That might be a little bit of an extreme analogy, but to get the point across to somebody as dense as Mr. Visco……….I think extreme is the only way to go.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 9:32 am and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.