Taxes and bureaucracy and crony capitalism are really high. The State and political parties also have a great propaganda machine in place and blame everything on tax evasion (it starts in school with specially designed cartoons [1]. Truth is that with a real tax rate that goes from 70% to well over 100%, only those who evade taxes or practice crony capitalism can survive.

But even despite this the tax evasion rate is really low in rich areas, even if you take into account the rate given by official stats (which are probably fake since those who made the stats need tax evasion to appear high in order to justify the persecutions of entrepeneur), while is a little higher than EU average in poor areas where people either eat or pay taxes (and in Italy there are no food stamps no real welfare for the cronically unemployed).

Also we had hundreds of capable entrepeneurs who were brought to suicide by State persecution, with illegitimate request of money from various government body.

Also, another fun thing is that if you are persecuted by our equivalent of the IRS you can go to a special court, where the judges are people who used to work for the IRS equivalent or similar institutions designed to persecute business (not exagerating). Despite this the IRS equivalent still loses over 50% of the time [3] because it asks for money it shouldn't even in light of our anti-business laws. Just recently they have been found out while bringing fake documents in court [2].

But that's nothing but a hint of the terrible tax situation in Italy, so there you have it

[1] https://goo.gl/images/VjFqaB [2] http://www.ilgiornale.it/news/politica/altro-che-fisco-amico... [3] http://www.linkiesta.it/it/article/2012/03/20/contenziosi-co...

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