> public officials are paid very little with the expectation that they will supplement their income with bribes. I'd like to offer my own perspective on this i

> public officials are paid very little with the expectation that they will supplement their income with bribes. I'd like to offer my own perspective on this issue, having spent a lot of time in the third-world, that may not be obvious to many of us in the western world or from more developed economies. Many countries that are struggling with i.e. building robust transportation and energy infrastructure, are also struggling with the infrastructure that enables the reliable collection and enforcement of taxes. These issues happen to be related. Tax collection in the US isn't perfect, but it generally works. What do you do when huge parts of your economy runs on cash or when huge swaths of your population don't even have bank accounts? There's a joke that bribes in the third-world are "directly paid taxes". There's a kernel of truth there. If Microsoft pays $100 in tax that's paid to a govt salary, versus that tax not existing and them paying it to the same official, what's the difference? Loss of accountability and oversight, yes. BUT -- the reason bribery is so egregious in the West is that the officials taking the bribes are already fairly compensated. Also, the Western system of government is filled with unethical bribe-analogues, in for example the lobbying system we have, worse in some sense is that this unethical behavior is codified into law in a way the general public may not agree with but has no real way of changing (refer to Princeton voter preference study). Consider all that when these "corruption index" lists are published where the US are the good guys with a green-colored country and countries in the third-world are red-colored bad guys. /rant