We are fed up with a tax burden that kills businesses and harasses Italian families, but – as Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi wisely recalled in yesterday's editorial of the “Corriere della Sera” – “what prevents us from reducing taxes is not the deficit, but the debt that continues to grow”. At the end of 2013, the Italian public debt will reach 133% of GDP, thirty points more in a decade, for an annual cost of interest of 85 million euros, destined to grow when inevitably rates, which are very low today, will rise.
Reducing taxes is not right but sacrosanct, but to do so we need to reduce the debt. And the roads - scribe Alesina and Giavazzi - are mainly two: either to tax private wealth through a wealth tax (which should be very high to significantly reduce the debt) or to reduce the space that the State occupies in the economy by privatizing companies and selling properties.
The two authors side with the second of the alternatives: privatization. And to do so, they dismantle some urban legends such as the failure of previous privatizations, starting with Telecom Italia, destroyed not by the retreat of the state but by subsequent private management. Not to mention the unquestionably successful privatization cases such as Nuovo Pignone or Autogrill.
We will now see what the Letta government will be able to do after the prime minister's promotion of privatizations in the City and on Wall Street and after the recent visit of the Minister of Economy, Fabrizio Saccomanni, to London. Nobody expects miracles, but there are essentially two litmus tests: local utilities, on which the Minister of Economic Development, Flavio Zanonato, is also moving, and the listing of Fincantieri.
It is incredible that it is not possible to bring to the Stock Exchange – not to cede control but only a share – a group, such as the shipbuilding one, which does Italy credit, but which needs resources to invest and maintain its leadership in the world, only because Fiom doesn't want to. With all due respect for the (past) history of Fiom, one cannot fail to recall that the CGIL metalworkers' union represents only a minimal percentage of the Italian population and has absolutely no right to exercise veto rights over the Government's choices. Provided, of course, that they actually exist.
But the crucial point is another comes to the conclusion of the editorial by Alesina and Giavazzi: "If really - the two academics conclude bitterly - privatization is so difficult, there remains only one way to reduce the debt: tax honest taxpayers" because "in the meantime the wealthy, worried about the possibility of their wealth being hit by a one-time estate, will have already hidden it abroad”.
It would be interesting to ask honest citizens and taxpayers what they think.
