Citizenship income is once again in the eye of the storm. When everything seemed resolved, with the arrival of the ad hoc decree finally containing rules written in black and white, the League seems willing to break the bank again.
The text should have arrived today in the Council of Ministers and instead it faced a further postponement. Maybe next week. First they will have to be resolved conflicts within the government which, for the first time, also directly involve the Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte.
From the Tav to immigration, the two souls of the executive just can't get along in love and get along. On the Turin-Lyon it has arrived the rejection of the cost-benefit commission, with the Carroccio who however has no intention of resigning to the No and calls for the referendum. On migrants, however, Salvini would not have appreciated the position taken by the Premier, endorsed by Di Maio, on Sea Watch and Sea Eye.
Citizenship income would therefore have ended up at the center of these disputes even if, officially, the problem would be technical: “Without funds for disability pensions we will not vote on basic income. It's not a spite, maybe there was a distraction, but it was part of the agreement”, Matteo Salvini said on 9 January.
According to the League, therefore, the resources should be redistributed again in order to remedy the "lack". The problem is that making ends meet on basic income is not a simple undertaking and it is not certain that the technicians have already managed to do so with the previous calculations. With a new front open, the (already fragile) numbers contained in the measure risk not returning again.
In this context, Di Maio tries to calm the spirits, by throwing an olive branch at the Government allies. There will be "260.000 Italian disabled people who now have economic treatment who will have access to the basic income program", said the deputy prime minister to the microphones of a Radio too, underlining that the measure will not lose 400 million, but at the on the contrary, he will earn them because the number of foreigners who will be able to access the basic income has been reduced and resources have been redistributed between minimum pensions, disability pensions and greater training for employment centres.
We recall that among the rules included in the decree there is also that relating to residence: only those who have resided in Italy for at least 10 years (in the previous draft there were 5) will be able to receive the subsidy, a criterion that is also valid for Italians - and so there it protects itself from the risk of unconstitutionality – which however de facto has reduced the number of eligible foreigners.
Finally, it must also be taken into consideration the excesses of the Cafés. On January 9, the National Consultation of Tax Assistance Centers asked the Government for a discussion on the new resources needed to deal with the amount of work deriving from the entry into force of the citizen's income: "the 2019 Isee agreement has not yet been signed due to the insufficient financial endowment of INPS, which would have a maximum expenditure limit of only 82 million, against an expected increase in single self-declarations, compared to 2018, due to the of the various measures adopted in the budget law”, the Cafs say. The risk is therefore that of throwing into a tailspin, not only the employment centers which will have to take care of finding a job for the beneficiaries, but also Caf and Poste Italiane which will instead have the task of sorting the millions of applications arriving from the next March.
