Il government contract Lega – Five Stars it would cost the state more than 100 billion euros a year. A sum that is difficult to put together, to say the least, also because the coverage explicitly provided for by the same document does not exceed 500 million. To reckon it is the Public Accounts Observatory of the Catholic University of Milan, led by the economist Carlo Cottarelli, former IMF and former commissioner for the spending review.
In detail, according to the Observatory, the measures contained in the 40-page program could weigh on the state accounts 125,7 billion euros. More than three billion a page.
The most expensive intervention palm belongs to the flat tax, which should be around 50 billion a year. They follow the basic income with 17 billion , sterilization of the VAT increase, which only this year will cost 12,5 billion. Moreover, unlike all other expenses, the intervention on the safeguard clause is not optional: if the new government fails to find the necessary money, the VAT rates will automatically rise starting from 2019 January XNUMX, damaging consumption and therefore the GDP.
But let's go back to the costs of the contract. As regards the pension chapter, the revision of the Fornero reform it would cost a little more than 8 billion, while the extension of exit flexibility to hitherto excluded categories of workers would require others 5 billion. On the tax side, 6 billion would be used to eliminate the excise duties on gasoline.
Yet: 6 billion for investments, 1,8 billion for the raising ofcivil allowance, 200 million to hire 10 thousand people in the police and as many to increase the staff of prison police.
The package of measures for the family it is rather vaguely explained in the contract, so the cost estimate cannot be precise. According to Cottarelli's Observatory, travel costs range from a few pennies to 17 billion. Even if this item were completely eliminated, therefore, the total bill would drop to a maximum of 108,7 billion.
And the covers? By themselves, those emerging from the contract would not allow financing even one of the interventions listed above. In fact, their value does not exceed half a billion, of which 200 million from cuts to international missions, as many from the scissors to the annuities and reduction in the number of MPs (which in any case would require a constitutional reform) e 100 million from the felling of pensions of gold (measure at high risk of censorship by the Consulta).
The contract then mentions other coverage, without however specifying any expected revenue. This is the case of resources coming from insurance policies sleep and come on current accounts forgotten in the banks, or the crackdown on the gioco d’azzardo.
Then there are the tax benefits harmful to the environment, which are not included in the program but have been the subject of some declarations by M5S exponents: cutting them all would bring about 16 billion in cash. But it would also damage entire industrial sectors, starting with transport.
