Italy and unchecked bonuses
This is why Italy's rain bonus policy doesn't work and ends up creating new pockets of social injustice or becoming a legislated form of waste of public money. The intervention of Francesco Provinciali, former MIUR inspection manager and judge on. Milan Juvenile Court
There are at least three facts that commentators on television talk shows (so buzzy when compared to the old, boring political forums) should always keep in mind while discussing today's "particular":
the 68 governments in 76 years of republic, the legislative bulimia generated by the desire of the current government to start all over again, as in a sort of game of the year zero, and finally the ministers' mania for protagonism to leave a memory of their own ride.
This is the most subjective data but certainly not the least influential on the disappointing results which can be summarized in some eloquent indicators: irreversible public debt, unstoppable tax evasion, economic stagnation, growing inflation, the decline of the middle class, the precariousness of work, the drain of brains and of pensioners abroad, compensated by an immigration which – absit iniuria verbis – produces many management problems and widespread social unease. A rancid soup of problems stirred up at home and poorly digested by Europe, of which we are always watched as special.
For some years now, people have been more concerned with handing out symbolic sops rather than imagining organic models of recovery and development, through radical reforms that are always postponed and playing on the side of decimals in the hope that they will produce miraculous multiplier effects. It is the policy of bonuses, tips, pardons, thousand extensions, and targeted donations that would have the ambition of compensating status deficits and smoothing out the distribution of resources.
Even in this phase preceding the budget law, there is talk of it, but in the kaleidoscope of the hypothesized measures there is more rhetoric than substance: a long-term story that reminds me of a personal anecdote. In the early 1990s (after Tangentopoli) I met an old friend who was soon to assume an important position in one of the many governments undergoing change and rebirth. The occasion was accidental: I was living in Genoa at the time and we met for a dinner of fish and porridge. It was in that circumstance that he revealed to me a prophecy which then promptly came true: "The problem of the years to come will be how to put your hands in the pockets of Italians in the most shrewd way".
The project has been completed and seems to be directed towards a demagogic social leveling: to restart the elevator of growth, stuck on the ground floor and with cobwebs and to raise low incomes, we ended up embarking on the heaviest and most punitive campaign of annihilation of the bourgeoisie and the productive middle class: they range from fixed-income public employees – I would call them “human ATMs” – to entrepreneurs who try to take flight but are held back by the ball and chain of a Byzantine bureaucracy, to pensioners perpetually under scrutiny of enlargement of the taxman who considers them defendants yes, precisely them, after 40 and more years of work, of unacceptable privileges. Fault of the mischievous and dishonest policy that has established certain taxonomies on golden pensions, which practically everyone falls into, except those who live on the threshold of poverty.
Poverty that – from one measure to another – instead of regressing raises the bar of numbers: we are at 1.9 million families and 5.6 million people, according to the recent Caritas Report.
And here the compensatory policies to redistribute income and bridge the gap between rich and poor (and here we need the inverted comma) resurrect corporate logic by status, age and profession: is Italy a country of empty cradles? Here is the baby bonus immediately, to be continued until the age of 18. Young people don't study and work, don't read and spend hours at the disco or taking selfies? A special bonus is ready for them: removing it becomes a sin of treason. Does the school leave something to be desired because the teachers are demotivated? For years, they have been encouraged with an annual bonus of 500 euros, which can be spent on books, computers or theatrical performances. The 110% building superbonus cost 38 billion and Minister Giorgetti admitted: "I have never seen a rule that cost so much for so few".
This story of bonuses began with the famous 80 euros, largely recovered in the tax return. I remember a deputy (later promoted to MEP) who showed up on TV with a mileage receipt to prove that 80 euros of spending solved many, really many problems of low-middle income families. The masterpiece of the theorem of the resurrection of the jobless through the donation of public money then arrived with the basic income: the failure of this donation includes both navigators and seafarers, i.e. those who benefit on average well below the hypothesized 780 euro and usually in a completely independent way from a job, albeit temporary.
We are talking about it but a new welfare model is still uncertain and susceptible to ongoing concessions: let's face it, this matter produces obvious electoral repercussions. All this demonstrates that the policy of rain bonuses doesn't work and ends up creating new pockets of social injustice or becoming a legislated form of waste of public money.
Secondly, it highlights the incapacity of politics to elaborate medium-long term far-sighted reforms and measures capable of hypothesizing sustainable social models, implementing an income redistribution policy that does not only produce downward homologations.
But the most striking data concerns the total absence of control mechanisms on the use of bonuses: the plethora of exceptions and postponements is constantly expanding.
A serious regulatory vulnerability, considering that we are dealing with public money.
It would be enough to legislate an organic policy of controls to ascertain which way the bonuses were spent and used, an a posteriori verification complete with documentation to be shown.
But the most serious thing is that control is reluctantly talked about: as if applying the rule of the "good father of a family" in the management of public finances were a sort of annoying and undue meddling and not a moral duty to assume.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/litalia-e-i-bonus-senza-controllo/ on Mon, 12 Dec 2022 07:38:06 +0000.