As one reads in good finance textbooks, the dynamics of many public expenditures depends by the automatic and largely unpredictable effects on the financial statements generated from the exercise of certain rights of the individual citizen: as exemplified in the case of the right to health protection and as one should prepare and equip oneself for the case of CBI. It is in fact a topic neglected by the confused debate on the financial consequences of the law that introduced the citizen's income. Theme covered by the controversy over the TAV which has destroyed all scientific credibility relating to the Italian use of the cost-benefit analysis as a tool to support the decisions of policy makers.
But the looming leap in the dark for public finance balances instead it is guaranteed, albeit in the general joy of the yellow-green government at least in the near future, with inevitable effects on the perfidious relationship between financial uncertainty and the trend in interest rates on public securities.
Here it is only recalled that, having obtained the go-ahead from the European Commission for the deficit financing of the citizen's income, the fact that a new expenditure item of a permanent nature has been included in the Italian public budget which must be guaranteed adequate financial coverage, hopefully avoiding the continued use of new public debt. This is a permanent expenditure since experience shows that once this measure is included in the welfare system, it becomes it is politically impossible to cancel it at least in the medium term.
Unfortunately, it is a financial burden that is difficult to predict since such expenditure will not be governed by the competent minister in office, but by the different individual and subjective options of the multifarious subjects to which the law assigns the right to request citizenship income. Subjects that differ in age, sex, economic and family condition, level of education, aptitude for work, geographical position and so on, whose crossing can only generate a series of combinations that only a special computer system can manage and gradually correct and adjust on the basis of the first experiments. But in the financial cheerfulness of the planning of the provision, there is no trace of the above, being also the navigators natural persons and not a network of specially programmed and expensive computers.
In summary, the yellow-green government has put in the hands of the Italian people a new blank cheque that the people themselves will be able to present for collection whenever they deem they possess the requisites to enjoy the benefits.
In anticipation of a long phase of stagnation in the Italian economy, no one should be surprised, either today or tomorrow, if the management of the public debt, gradually increasing as a percentage of GDP, will be increasingly difficult and painful: it is only the result of the current failure to respect the iron law which, once the short season of financial happiness has passed, will have to guide the next one preparation of the economic and financial planning document for the years to come, together with subsequent public budgets. Will the yellow-green populist government be able to abandon financial cheerfulness or will it prefer to leave the hot potato it cooked itself in the hands of others?
