The mistake was already made once of intervening on a reform of the pension system by widening the retirement age, with the result of increasing public spending and forcing the next government to intervene even more harshly to restore a system unsustainable. At the time it was the Prodi government which abolished the grand staircase envisaged by the Maroni reform. And then Fornero was forced to take drastic measures. Now Letta and the Minister of Labor Giovannini risk making the same mistake again by invoking exit flexibility, i.e. bringing the possibility of retiring back to 62, re-proposing the hypothesis of a "relay" already rejected by experts on the subject, and even attempting to penalize existing pensions with a solidarity contribution which has already been rejected by the Constitutional Court. But the calculations do not add up either from a financial point of view or from the point of view of the direction of economic policy.
Dismantle the Fornero reform in the key point of the "staircase" by granting the possibility of retiring at 62, albeit with a small penalty of 8%, also thus solving the problem of redundancies (moreover dramatically inflated by the unions), it would cost very dearly, plastering the state budget, and not solving in any way the problem of relaunching our economy and therefore jobs for the youngest. Undersecretary Dell'Aringa, an expert on the labor market, underlined that such a measure could eventually be adopted only for companies in crisis to replace the Redundancy Fund, while it would be much better to make employment centers work and, if anything, to encourage companies that hire people who have passed a certain age threshold. Other experts have calculated that the penalty for early withdrawal should be more than 30% and not just a modest 8% as envisaged by the proposals of Damiano and other members of the Democratic Party.
Even worse would be the consequences of a super-taxation measure on the so-called golden pensions (from 90 euros gross per year) which seems to meet with the favor of many political exponents both on the right and on the left, so much so that Mussolini is found next to I sell it. To overcome the obstacle of the Constitutional Court sentence, it is thought to put this extraordinary contribution not only on pensioners from on all incomes above a certain threshold. In short, new taxes on the middle class which will then be called upon to pay the IMU on the basis of the rich-meter, the health Ticket which is expected to reduce the number of exempt persons, and who knows what other impositions will emerge from the review of the tax breaks we are talking about time ago.
All this without considering that for pensions exceeding 1500 euros gross per month, the suspension of the adjustment to the cost of living is already in force, which even with inflation as low as the current one, will in any case lead over time to a significant reduction in the income of retirees. It is true that the current pensions have been calculated using the salary method and therefore are higher than the calculation of the contributions paid according to the capitalization method. In short, a gift, more or less great, was given to many pensioners. But it's been at least thirty years since all the experts have warned against the unsustainability of the wage system, and why are politicians waking up only now? And moreover they want to penalize those who have been retired for years (and who could hardly find work alternatives) to the advantage of those who have yet to retire and who would be old enough to try to stay in the world of work.
This choice is in total contradiction with what all economic policy experts have been preaching for some time, namely with the need to shift taxation from direct and indirect and property taxes, thus favoring work to the detriment of consumption and excess capitalization especially real estate. Instead, all the increases in direct taxes mentioned above would serve to avoid the increase in VAT and to reduce the burden of the Imu.
Increasing VAT, perhaps by reviewing the whole basket of goods that enjoy reduced rates item by item and bringing to 22% only those goods that are not of vital importance for families, with a parallel reduction in taxes on labour, means facilitating competitiveness of our goods (VAT is not paid on exports, while it weighs on imports) to a greater extent the stronger the tax relief on labour. In this sense, the shift of the tax burden from direct to indirect taxes could be a fundamental element of the broader reform action necessary for the recovery of competitiveness of the Italian system.
So far, many have criticized Letta for her tactic of postponing problems. However, everyone underlined that she was going in the right direction. Now, however, if instead of following Saccomanni's indications on cutting public spending (albeit not painlessly) and on the sale of state-owned companies and local entities, we start messing around with pensions and increase personal income tax rates, it must be said that only the government is moving too timidly, but it is also going in the wrong direction.
