Burning while Rome fiddles

IT WAS a familiar business. An Italian government anxious for money, but too nervous to tackle the way public money is being spent. The mini-budget announced by Romano Prodi, the prime minister, just before Easter was meant to find the 15.5 trillion lire ($9.5 billion) deemed necessary to meet the no-more-than-3%-of-GDP deficit required by the European Union's Maastricht rules for monetary union. The mini-budget comes on top of a harsh 1997 budget (a 62 trillion lire tightening), a 1996 summer mini-budget (a 16 trillion lire squeeze) and a “tax for Europe”, to be paid in May and November, that will cost an Italian family earning a comfortable 60m lire an extra 2.5% of its annual income.