Oh, I forgot to mreention a little gem in the manovra (adjustment plan) recently voted by Parliament. Originally Mr Tremonti set off with a bold plan to cut drastically the cost of politics by aligning the salaries of all public top jobs, including members of Parliament, of local governments, managers of public companies and so on. Already in the version presented to the Senate, a little comma (in article 1) was added, which indicated that, well, the revision would take place only starting from the next elections or renewal of the appointment (so if you had just been nominated as a board member, say of RAI TV, with a 5 year contract you could sleep quiet dreams until 2016). In the Senate, another little comma was added: for “Europe” , ehm, you really meant “the mean of the 6 main (i.e richest) European countries” , and furthermore, the average was not a simple average, but a “weighted average” with weights proportional to countries GDP. So Germany would get the largest weight, and so on. The estimated offect of the gem was to raise the monthly wage of a politician by 12,000 Euro per month with respect to the orginal version: not too bad indeed. (see also this nice graph showing the relationship between PM’s wages and procapita GDP in Europe: Italian politician, to be in line with the rest of Europe, should make areound 50,000 a year, on average. They make 150,000)