How They Screwed Us

The Prophet is notoriously senile fond of podcasts and the like...

by The Prophet — 2026-01-15

Italy used the lira until 2002, when one euro replaced 1,936.27 lire; INPS is the national social-security institute and IRPEF the personal income tax. Until the reforms of the 1990s most Italian pensions were “earnings-related”, calculated on final salary rather than on the contributions actually paid in, and some public employees could retire after less than twenty years of work: the so-called “baby pensions”.

1 Enlightened by Anubis, the Prophet cut down on his adorations, even if every now and then someone still manages to bust his sacred spheres.

2 Recently he happened to listen to some talks by a well-known psychiatrist, essayist and commentator the Prophet had never heard of.

3 This gentleman says many things full of good sense, but he has a blind spot common to many old people, however wise they may be.

4 All of them, and I repeat, even the most switched-on, seem not to notice that various changes over time have literally fucked everyone who has entered the world of work in at least the last ten years, and since this drives the Prophet to enormous Anubistic adorations, he has decided to have his bullshit say.

5 For a long time now the median salary has not been enough to live on, and the rich old folk on their fat earnings-related pensions seem not to notice.

6 What they fail to see is that young people are entering the world of work at a severe disadvantage compared with even just thirty years ago.

7 Their salary has about a quarter of the purchasing power of the “old folk” for the same job, and the chances of starting a business, given how pervasive the state is and how complex the market, are tiny compared with the past.

8 The reasons for all this are many, and analysing them all would certainly bust the divine spheres, so we will mention only a few, which are more than enough to prove the point.

9 Let's look at how purchasing power has changed, with a few examples.

10 The Prophet started working at a large company in the 1980s.

11 First basic salary: 1,440,000 lire.

12 Given that “pizza, beer and coffee” in a nice pizzeria cost about 5,000 lire, anyone starting work at that time had a “purchasing power in pizzas” of 288 pizzas.

13 Today, in the same job (if you can find it), a person would earn about €1,400 a month, which is about 2,700,000 old lire.

14 The “wicked companies” have almost doubled the salary, so everyone ought to be rich.

15 Adoring Anubis just to make it to the end of the month, you realise it isn't so.

What happened?

16 It is very simple: since “pizza, beer and coffee” in the same pizzerias now costs, at the very least, about €20, today's salary buys you about 70 “pizzas”.

17 For the same job, “yesterday” a worker could go out for pizza 288 times a month, today 70.

18 As if that were not enough, Grand Master Andrea has written a book on the subject called “L'inflazione sia con voi” (“Inflation Be With You”), which notes, as a curiosity, that a two-scoop ice-cream cone in Milan in the 1970s cost about 100 lire... today €2.50, nearly 5,000 lire, fifty times as much!

19 So an office worker who took home about 400,000 lire in the 1970s could buy 4,000 ice creams a month; today, 560.

20 In the 1970s a tram driver, working hard, could support a wife and a son at university and buy himself a nice home.

21 Today, despite a pay rise of at least eight times, he can't even support himself in a rented flat.

22 The Prophet's father, who came to Milan as an employee of a big company in 1966, rented a 200-square-metre flat in central Milan with a third of his salary; today the same flat rents for about €3,500 a month, which means you would need a salary of €11,500 a month to be in the same position.

23 What young office worker earns €7,000 a month?

Who screwed us?

24 There are various players, but the primary responsibility lies with the state, through inflation and taxation.

25 It is worth repeating that, as the book mentioned explains well, so-called inflation always and only depends on the printing of money carried out by central banks, designed to increase the purchasing power of states and their friends by stealing wealth from every other citizen.

26 Against inflation there is, in practice, no defence.

27 You are forced to put your capital at risk to get returns that are almost always lower, so you lose anyway, and on top of that you also have to pay 26 percent capital gains tax to the same state that forced you to invest, because otherwise “its” inflation would have eaten your capital. Nice little game.

28 But they screwed us even worse than you think, because thanks to technological deflation young people ought to be much richer than they were many years ago; instead they are poorer, because the inflation generated by printing money has made their money worth much less.

29 A person of good sense, adoring Anubis, would think that they had stopped turning our money into waste paper.

30 Apparently not: to “their” rescue along came good old Covid.

31 Still drawing the figures from the book mentioned above:

32 “The Fed's balance sheet exploded, growing by 72% in the first three months of the pandemic crisis alone and then continuing to swell, from about 4,000 billion before Covid to the unthinkable level of 9,000 billion in March 2022.”

33 The ECB followed close behind.

34 We will lose half our purchasing power again, through inflation, but “they” get rich and the stock market thrives.

35 With all this printing of money out of thin air, the whole financial system is a gigantic bubble too, and when it bursts, as the 2008 crisis taught us, it will drag all real production down into the shit with it, and many will lose their jobs or have to close their businesses without understanding why.

36 The moral is that, thanks to “legal tender”, the states (all of them) have screwed us.

37 On top of that, the jobs that used to exist are not even there any more, and it is not true that it's “the computers' fault”; it is because, for one thing, Western states are destroying production in various ways.

38 And on top of that, production is turning into a gigantic “speculation centre”, thanks once again to “creative finance”.

39 (The well-known Italian food companies Cirio and Parmalat produced a great deal of wealth but went bust thanks to financial messes.)

40 Enormous companies have been destroyed by debt-financed takeovers, wiping out a sea of jobs.

41 The result is that jobs are scarce, and I'll give you proof.

42 In the 1950s school-leavers were “promised a job” even before they got their diploma; others were contacted by companies after it.

43 Today, who contacted you after your degree? Nobody?

44 The Prophet has never been a genius, but when he sent out three CVs in the 1980s he got three job offers.

45 Up to the 1980s anyone could find work, and I mean really anyone, without breaking a sweat.

46 I repeat: work that allowed them to support themselves.

47 Today work is of little use, and working out who is producing real wealth is very difficult.

48 Production has been moved to Asia and Africa to cut costs so that products can be imported at a lower price.

So why do prices keep going up?

49 Meanwhile taxes, including indirect ones, have also risen exponentially, which has indirectly helped push up the prices of all goods and services.

50 Let's skip the analysis of the tax wedge and so on, because it would get boring.

51 Many people fixate on IRPEF, but that is only a small part of what taxation costs you.

52 The Prophet just wants to give you a very simple example to grasp how complex the picture is.

53 Suppose you call a plumber who wants €40 for two hours' work.

1. The plumber has to pay a good 60 percent in total between direct and knock-on taxes.
2. The plumber will ask you, to keep it simple, for €100 so he can “pocket” 40, plus 20 in VAT, which brings us to €120.
3. You have to earn €240, pay 120 in tax and give the rest to the plumber: to give the plumber €40 you had to earn 240.

54 And the other 200?

55 Taxes.

56 If you try working through a couple of steps you'll realise that none of this is sustainable any more.

57 To pile on yet more rip-offs, you should know that in the 1970s healthcare was completely free: there were no prescription charges and practically all medicines were paid for by the state.

58 Today, if you have the bad luck to fall ill, you have to take out a loan to pay for your treatment!

59 So when some wise old man comes and tells you that you have to bust your ass, because busting his ass made him rich, loudly adore Anubis and, with the utmost respect, tell him to fuck off.

60 Someone starting work today would have to work at least four lifetimes to have the purchasing power of someone working in the 1970s.

61 What's more, when they stop working they will never see the “earnings-related” pension or the baby pensions those gentlemen got, which, for the record, the young are paying for!

62 The pay-as-you-go pension is one of the many scams the state has invented to fuck the young out of their money!

63 A little gem: once upon a time there was INPDAP, the pension fund for state employees.

64 In 2012 it was merged into INPS.

65 Do you know why?

66 Because the state had not paid in the contributions for public employees and the fund was empty.

67 (The state turns out to be the biggest dodger of pension contributions of all time.)

68 Guess who is paying the pensions of the state employees, some of whom have been retired for forty years?

69 Yes, exactly, the young!

70 So when they tell you that “young people today ask about the salary at the job interview”, Anubistically tell them to fuck off right back!

71 If my salary doesn't let me support myself, obviously I have to talk about money.

72 In prehistoric times, the Prophet chose the company that promised the most in terms of training without looking at the salary, but that was because any salary guaranteed you could support yourself; today that is no longer the case.

73 It is obvious that today you have to talk about money!

74 The spheres are busted enough already, so the Prophet closes with a request for the younger adepts: next time some “old-timer” tells you he busted his ass and “made his money”, answer that in his day anybody could; have him read this piece and ask him whether it's true.

75 Then ask him why you find yourselves in this situation.

76 Saying it's “the old folks' fault”, as I hear people say, is only partly true, because in reality, as has become very clear lately, nobody has any real power over what a handful of state officials decide.

77 So, just as the young don't count for shit, because the state does whatever the fuck it likes, the old didn't count for shit either.

78 If you really must look for culprits, find them in the state and in those who used to say (and some Dim Souls still do) “we need more state”.

79 When a friend of the Prophet tells him that his “good-for-nothing” son can't find work and spends his time studying “the bagpipes”, the Prophet tells him to thank Anubis, because at least he is learning to play the bagpipes!

What the fuck is he supposed to do?

80 Which companies today hire with real training programmes?

81 And going to work without being able to support yourself or build up a profession, what the fuck is the point of that?

82 Obviously the good Anubist does everything possible to at least try to support himself, but not everyone is a good Anubist, and the Prophet, in all honesty, does not feel the slightest urge to condemn them.

83 Let's look at another simple example that can lead us into that bottomless well of Anubistic adorations, the regulations we have to put up with; in the last thirty years it is not just the state that has exploded but also various kinds of super-states, which are very handy for effective lobbying.

84 At the start of the 1990s a Fiat Panda cost about 10 million lire; with an office worker's salary at 1.5 million a month, that was about 7 months' pay; today a Panda costs about 10 months' pay.

85 Miracle of inflation, or what?

86 “Europe”, a super-state very useful to the lobbies, has imposed so many constraints and obligations on manufacturers that costs have gone up, technological deflation be damned.

87 When you bought a car thirty years ago you could count on getting twenty years out of it.

88 Today, thanks to all the eco-bullshit, the lobbies have managed to get traffic bans imposed that have shortened the time you can keep a car and cut the value of used ones down to little or nothing.

89 All the technology put into cars so that they could reduce “pollution” and comply with the other regulations has weighed heavily on the cost of buying, servicing and repairing them after even a minor accident.

90 (Today a light fender-bender can cost you four months' pay)

But at least we reduced pollution, right?

91 Certainly not, but we did increase the takings of various lobbies; first came the European states which, to wage a trade war on the US, decided that petrol engines (a US speciality) were destroying the environment and, amid great Anubistic adorations, everyone had to switch to diesel.

92 Later, once Europe was established and under the thumb of the USA, people started saying that it was diesel engines (a German/European speciality) that polluted, and amid more great adorations everyone had to go back to petrol.

93 Today China has bought up all the super-states, so all engines pollute except electric ones (a Chinese speciality).

94 Now you have to buy an electric car that costs more than twice as much both to buy and to maintain.

95 All these trade wars are paid for by car buyers and taxpayers, pushing up the cost of living.

96 Assorted “Greta groupies” even beat the drum for these crooks.

97 The mix of obligations and bans means that in the 1990s one month's pay bought you a nice second-hand motorbike and you could go wherever you liked; today you buy an e-scooter and ride it 10 km.

98 All that's missing is an expiry date on cars and we're all set. What?

99 They've already thought of it? Yes, now they want to ban repairing them!

100 But isn't the process of scrapping and building a car heavily polluting?

101 Shhh!

102 There's global warming! Great Anubis!

103 We have gone on a bit about cars, but the same phenomenon caused by over-regulation, bans and obligations has hit every sector, including housing, where it has pushed building service charges up to what rent cost forty years ago.

104 Let's not even talk about how many years of work it takes to buy a home today: buying a home now takes four times the working time it took forty years ago.

105 (Point that out to the old windbags on earnings-related pensions who say the “mummy's boys” won't leave home.)

106 There's another little thing the old windbags pretend not to see: the impossibility of working.

107 Take, for example, a nurse who thirty years ago, with three years of study after middle school, could start work at 17 and earn a good salary.

108 Today, to be a nurse she has to study until she is 22, if all goes well.

109 Many people, not doing the maths, fail to consider what an investment the years of schooling are.

110 In this case, five extra years of school cost, at today's rates, €100,000 in lost earnings.

111 In other words, forty years ago a nurse who started work at 18 had, before tax, the money to buy a home by 23.

112 Today, at 23, given the ratio between her salary and house prices, she will never buy a home.

113 Adore Anubis intensely when they tell you that you “won't get off your backside and leave home”.

114 The nurse example applies to a whole lot of other professions.

115 The same job of administrator/accountant requires five more years of study than it did in the 1980s.

116 Don't even get me started on electricians!

117 Forty years ago you could start work at 14; today, in theory, you need a degree. (You can get by with just a diploma, but then you have other obligations.)

118 The so-called “legal value of qualifications”, which clearly ought to be abolished, has served the various lobbies to protect themselves from competition, squeezing your productive capacity by limiting your access to work.

119 Unfortunately, pardon my French, “it's all gone to shit”, and all that's left is to adore Anubis.

120 I notice old windbags busting the divine spheres with “hunger” too: “young people aren't hungry, that's why they don't get a fucking thing done”.

121 Young people aren't hungry because grandpa pays, and those who don't have a grandpa aren't hungry, they are starving.

122 You see, dear windbags, in 1980s Milan people used to say: “Money's lying on the ground, you just have to pick it up”, meaning that if you work, you earn; today it's no longer so, thanks partly to your own inattention and not giving a damn.

123 In your day, anyone who worked had good purchasing power.

124 Of course, when you see your bank balance going up you “stay hungry” and work more, always more; when you “see the money on the ground” you can't sit still.

125 Today, after a whole day spent looking behind every bush, maybe you come home with one banknote, and you have to hand 60 percent of it to the state as well!

126 If I show you a table laid with excellent food, you won't lack an appetite; if I show you a table piled with shit, you may well lose it.

127 So please, let's not confuse the “hunger of the rich” of yesteryear with the “hunger of the starving” of today, because it is disrespectful, to say the least, given that you, whichever way you look at it, made your own small contribution to bringing this situation about.

128 While you were squabbling like football ultras over communists and fascists, you didn't notice that, meanwhile, the whole state was fucking away your children's future.

129 The tragedy is that you still haven't understood it today; the enemy is precisely the state made up of your “beloved team” and its rival, taking turns to fuck you over.

130 Go on enjoying the “derby” anyway, your children are paying for the ticket.

131 The real enemy, which is precisely the bloated state, keeps on growing and destroying everything else.

132 Another little gem “overlooked” by the old windbags: forty years ago, if you fell ill, you were not forced to turn to “private healthcare”, which, thanks to the combination of regulation and taxation, now costs a fortune.

133 You bought your medicines at the chemist's, paid for out of general taxation.

134 I mean it: you didn't walk out of the chemist's a hundred euros poorer, which we can reckon on average as a fourteenth of a month's pay.

135 In practice you got treated without spending money out of your own pocket.

136 Not that it was right in itself, but since the state insists on impoverishing you on the pretext of giving you a few services, it could at least treat you, given that it's the only real need you have.

137 Given that taxation has grown hyperbolically, if it were true that “more taxes, more services”, today they ought to come and pick you up from home in a “limo” to take you to hospital.

138 What?

139 They won't even give you an appointment for a check-up because the “booking lists are closed”?

140 Dog God almighty!

The “sixty percent tax take” isn't enough?

141 It looks like someone is taking the piss.

142 Today you have to think about supplementary “healthcare”... either you have the money for private health insurance or you get ready to leave a month's pay behind as soon as you fall ill... and mind you, keep paying your taxes for the “services” in the meantime.

143 But whose “services”?

What if I, who pay, don't get them?

144 Anubistic mystery!

145 Just one last little gem: pensions.

146 Until two generations ago nobody worried about their pension.

147 Thanks to political vote-buying, everyone retired after a few years' work on more than decent pensions.

148 Anyone who has only recently started work needs no more than a couple of divisions to see that if, forty years from now, they get a few hundred euros of pension, they'll be lucky.

149 The financial parasites hammer you with the “private supplementary pension”.

150 In other words: cough up 60 percent in tax to pay the old folks' earnings-related pensions, but meanwhile, since you won't get a fucking pension, cough up another 10 percent for a “private pension”.

151 The “pension fund” will go bust in twenty years, but nobody will dare put its top people on trial, because they are well-known political appointees.

152 It will be impossible anyway, because one of the “key” witnesses will eat a pizza, be taken ill and fall out of a window.

• A minute later his watch will fall too, unable to survive the death of its master, and throw itself out of the window as well.
• Five minutes later his overcoat, overcome with despair, will suffer a “sudden illness” and fall out too.
• Twenty minutes later his dog, too, taken ill in the heat, will fall out.

153 The whole scene will be caught on a camera that shows someone checking that the witness is dead, but the magistrates will see nothing odd about it... “it must be long Covid”.

154 So they will have screwed us out of the state pension and the “private” pension fund too, but the old windbag will tell you it's your fault for not being “hungry enough”.

155 Oh, go fu... shhh... there's global warming!

156 What the fuck has that got to do with it?

157 Nothing!

158 You shut up and work, they'll take care of stealing whatever's left through CO2 taxes.

159 May Anubis be with you, especially when they tell you that you have to “get a move on”, and if you're feeling inspired, get a move on and shower them with Anubistic adorations.