The Governor of Italy’s Central Bank recently remarked that tax evasion was responsible for the ‘social butchery’ the country has witnessed over the past few years. Five times the size of the government’s emergency budget, tax evasion involves 0,00016% chance of actually having to pay up.
The government has recently pushed through parliament budget cuts for €24bn ($27.4bn), slashed funding for education, research, culture and of course what passes for welfare support in Italy. In the meantime, in the year to December 2009, indebtedness was the second-highest in Europe after Greece. Pushed up by the combination of the financial crisis and the government’s utter unwillingness to do anything to retain foreign investment or prevent capital and industrial flight from Italy, the unemployment rate went up 1.5% to 8%, with youth unemployment around 33% nationally, and well over 40% in the South. Governor Draghi also said GDP dropped by 6%, real income has dropped 3.4%, consumption has dropped 2.5%, and exports have fallen by a massive 22%.