The leader of the 5 Stars, Giuseppe Conte, he said he has left a Ferrari in Italy and that the current government has turned into an old mill that hardly gets going.
Conte, perhaps out of modesty, forgot about the Draghi government, also supported by his party, which thanks to the personal prestige gained at the ECB, managed to pull the country out of the shallows in which Count 2 he had left him due to his inability to launch a credible plan for the funds allocated by Brussels and due to the dead end he had gotten himself into in the fight against Covid. Let us remember that Draghi had to appoint General Figliuolo to manage a mass vaccination plan which was actually successful.
The difficulties of the Meloni government on the economy
Not that the Meloni government in economics is doing significant things. Indeed, apart from the will to do not exceed public accounts for fear of the punishment of the markets which could suddenly turn against the Italian BOTs and perhaps blow up the Government as happened to Liz Truss in Great Britain, the Meloni ministers demonstrate a statism out of time and an unrealistic autarkic posture that risks discouraging investments, especially foreign ones. All aggravated by tax on extra profits of the banks which made the president pronounce the concept of "fair profit" which means that politics claims the right to establish whether a company has earned the "fair" amount or not.
The Conte Governments: from the superbonus to the Dignity decree
But the shortcomings of the current government do not justify bizarre criticisms from a Movement like the 5 Stars which in its years of government has demonstrated that it does not have the slightest idea of how the economy works in an advanced country, as despite their contribution , it's still Italy. Other than a Ferrari, if anything Conte left a toy car, where under the bodywork, instead of the engine, there were only a pair of pedals!
Just to mention a few sensational misdeeds of the Conte governments, without forgetting that the first was associated with the Alloy of Salvini and in the second the Pd with its leaders such as Orlando, Franceschini, Gualtieri, we mention Di Maio's dignity decree, the Citizenship Income, the 110% Superbonus. And in institutional matters, the reduction in the number of parliamentarians which should have been the first step towards a reform of the institutions and which instead proved to be only a further obstacle to an effective reform of parliamentary work.
Il dignity decree had the aim of improving the conditions of workers by reducing precariousness. It was such a flop that Di Maio himself, after a few years, was forced to modify it to avoid reductions in employment. On the CBI there has been a lot of talk. To help the poor, who also exist and who must be assisted by a modern State, the audience has expanded enormously and there has been confusion between those who should be sent to work with specific "active policies" and those who instead should continue to be assisted for a long time. The result was to create, especially in the South, a mass of assisted people, who then perhaps dedicated themselves to doing some illegal work.
Lastly there are the 110% superbonus and the facade bonus which are defended by Conte with completely false statements. In fact, it is absolutely not true that these bonuses made a fundamental contribution to GDP growth in 2021 and 2022. In fact, the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates the contribution of construction to the growth of around 1-1,5% 11% of GDP in the two years. The problem is that this contribution, however modest, cost the state coffers a monstrous sum of 120-130 billion with which many other more urgent and more useful things could have been done to increase the productivity of the system and therefore the possibilities of grow in the future. Not only that, but in fact the wealthier classes especially took advantage of the bonus, so there was a redistribution of income from the poorest to the richest. Finally, the result of all this work was truly negligible from an environmental point of view, leading to a reduction in Co2 emissions by a small percentage.
And also the honourable Chiara Appendino, former mayor of Turin, who is said to have attended Bocconi, how can he not understand that it is absurd to give an incentive higher than the cost of the contracted work, because this pushes the client to be disinterested in the prices charged by the contracting company so much so that there has been a surge of the prices of all building raw materials. And even Gualtieri, who was Conte 2's Treasury minister, cannot justify himself with the Covid emergency. A serious minister opposes the nonsense to the point of threatening to resign! In short, Conte's economy has brought the state budget to the brink of bankruptcy while it has given a good hand not so much to growth, but to inflation which in fact is still present in our country.
Even on the minimum wage there are many errors
The 5 Stars have no idea how to govern a complex country. They remained at the local market accounts. Theirs too proposal on legal minimum wage, embraced by the Democratic Party and Calenda, is leaking from all sides. Once again a positive idea is distorted into a demagogic proclamation (to raise the lowest wages) without understanding that to increase both wages and jobs, a overall review of the labor market, change union rules and practices, give the right training to young people and women, then giving these categories suitable incentives to make it convenient for them to approach the world of work.
And instead Conte, followed with his eyes closed by Schlein, aims only to have a law to be able to repeat the performance of the 5 Stars who, when the Citizenship Income was approved, had looked out from the balcony to shout that "poverty had been defeated “. Now Conte wants to find some window from which to announce to the people that, thanks to him, wages will be increased. It's a shame that to do this he secretly plans a fund financed by the taxes paid by all citizens, including workers.
Italian politics is increasingly prey to unbridled demagogy. Nobody looks at the medium term anymore. No one carefully evaluates the consequences of decisions made based on the desire to satisfy the immediate needs of their customers and corporations. Grillo and the 5 Stars have made demagoguery take a further epochal leap. Now Grillo is silent, perhaps because he has realized the disaster he caused. Now let's hope for a similar comeback from Salvini. But to have it the Italians will need to come to the next ones European elections show that they are fed up with politicians making promises written in the sand.
