Il tax cut to the benefit above all of the workers and the new rules on work will be the heart of today's government's maxi-maneuver. But the Cabinet will also approve interventions on the house, on the school and on the debts of the PA to businesses. Here are the details of these last measures.
Home. The measures for the house are contained in the provision on which the technicians of the Ministry of Infrastructure have been working for some time, led by Maurizio Lupi already in the previous Letta government. Those of a fiscal nature will concern properties leased with "agreed" contracts, i.e. with a duration of three years plus two and maximum rents fixed according to the method that provides for the involvement of owners and tenants associations. They should provide for the reduction to 4 per thousand of the tax rate for owners (even if the methods of financial coverage of the reduction have yet to be defined) as well as the reduction from 15% to 10% of the "dry" coupon. A tax relief could also be envisaged for property builders who reserve a portion of the apartments built for social housing, i.e. to be rented to economically disadvantaged families with fees defined with local authorities. In addition to tax breaks, special urban planning awards and procedural simplifications would be provided for these builders.
For the rest, Lupi's housing plan provides for the recovery of public housing in the IACP and the Municipalities, according to a program that the ministry will have to finalize within six months using the funds (about 500-600 million euros) recovered from previous destinations to blocked works.
Facilitations should also be envisaged to encourage the purchase of social housing by tenants who already occupy them, with the allocation of revenues by the owner bodies to maintenance and redevelopment of their building stock. Among these measures, there could also be room for the enhancement of the so-called "rent to buy", i.e. the possibility for the lessee to use part of the rent paid as a share price for the purchase.
School building. The head of the government, Matteo Renzi, said it immediately in his inaugural speech to the Chamber: the maintenance of school buildings and the construction of new schools must be considered a priority for the country. Thus the Government aims to find 2-3 billion euros, within the constraints of the stability pact, to be allocated to school building, entrusting the Undersecretary to the Presidency of the Council, Graziano Delrio, a role of "strong" coordination of the initiatives, to overcome bureaucratic delays and any inertia of the institutional subjects involved in the operation.
Although the government's priority for the revitalization of the Italian system, however the interventions for schools will not be effective as a driving force for development, since given the inviolable limits of the stability pact, the resources destined for school construction will be subtracted from other investment uses.
Public administration debts. To give a decisive acceleration to the payment program of the old debts of the public administrations, started by the Monti and Letta governments, a project has been developed, which provides that the payments are made by banks and credit institutions against a guarantee granted to them by the State, based on the resources of Cassa depositi e prestiti. In this way, approximately 50 billion of credits still owed by companies should be liquidated, some of which even predate 2012.
The Government provision should also intervene on some procedural aspects of the payment plan, to remove some obstacles that have made its initial implementation slow and complex. Many local authorities, in particular, have not started the formalities necessary to enter the payment program and to proceed with the liquidation of their debts.
Simplifications. Not an ad hoc provision, but a widespread series of procedural simplification interventions included in the various provisions that the Government will launch today, starting with that on the labor market. The red tape is another of the key points of the Renzi government, but it does not seem that already today they will be entrusted to an autonomous legislative initiative. For the business system, destined to be disappointed by the "cuts" in the tax wedge, concentrated instead on workers, Renzi promises a series of procedural simplifications and streamlining, which can lighten company costs and remove operational constraints, thereby contributing to the improvement of the competitiveness of Italian companies.
Perhaps later the Government will be able to draw on the work that the special bicameral parliamentary commission, chaired by Bruno Tabacci, is carrying out in this legislature, on the side of the regulatory and procedural simplifications necessary to improve the competitiveness of the Italian system.
Type of measures and implementation times. It is an aspect, that of the regulatory instruments to which the imminent initiatives of the Government are entrusted, regularly omitted in the announcements and declarations that the prime ministers and ministers of all the Executives usually disseminate before the adoption of the measures. Yet they constitute a decisive element for evaluating the effectiveness of initiatives, especially at a time like the present, in which there is a need for an immediate boost to the economic framework to support the embryos of the recovery that are appearing and to effectively and investment and employment quickly.
Law decrees are expected, which will make the initiatives adopted immediately operational. However, it is likely that only one measure of this rank will be adopted today and that simple bills will contain most of the measures. This also (perhaps above all) to give the Government time to find the necessary resources for the financial coverage of what has been decided, as well as to have time to fine-tune the legal provisions.
As for the decree-law, the fear is that it could refer too much of its contents to subsequent regulations and ministerial decrees for implementation, with which the Government is already overwhelmed with arrears since they are inherited from the Executives that preceded it. Also in this case, the referral to subsequent implementing measures often serves no other purpose than to postpone the decisions, without admitting the impossibility of enacting them immediately due to lack of financial resources or due to the lack of development of all the regulatory framework necessary for the 'operation.
