Winston Churchill said that "when a nation tries to tax itself to achieve prosperity, it is as if a man stood up in a bucket and tried to lift himself by the handle".
The reasoning, of course, is flawless, but not all of them, when for convenience, when for sinister opportunism, they seem to want to pay attention to it.
And therefore they end up always trying again, relying on the "distraction" of those who do not have the useful tools to understand the conspiracies of a perverse political action that tends to implement discontent, pandering to it, to self-finance itself and guarantee itself the minimum space of survival.
The events of the last few days demonstrate this.
Although it was not formally put to the vote of the members of the executive in the control room, and given the opposition expressed by Lega, Forza Italia and Italia Viva, as well as the perplexities expressed by the exponents of the 5 Star Movement, there seems to be no agreement , as in fact, was lacking for the tax amendment to the Maneuver: therefore no agreement was reached on the "solidarity contribution" to be charged to incomes above seventy-five thousand euros.
In essence, it would have been a question of making a laughable withdrawal of about 20 euros per month from the savings of the wealthiest citizens to support (so to speak) those who were below that income threshold and help them to cope with the looming dear bills. Nothing quaestio, if only it were not for that couple of gruesome basic distortions that lead us to qualify, in the too reductive terms of inadmissibility, the work of the one who, with the passing of the months, has revealed himself (but basically we have always known this) to be an authentic "plastic" Premier (to paraphrase the words contained in a famous text by Carmen Consoli): the one for which the people must paradoxically self-finance themselves in times of difficulty, and not only; the other for which being modestly wealthy in a narrow territorial and economic context such as the Italian one constitutes a sin to be expiated rather than a merit to be encouraged; the further one for which the Government, despite Mario Draghi, absolutely nothing intends to put in place, and / or can put in place, to counter the arrival of the so-called "dear bills" at this point inevitable, if not to pretend to show compassionate closeness to the "poor" by placing a false contribution on the "rich" in order to be, that same contribution, infinitely modest in its amount in order to be able to rise to concrete support.
It is the usual story: the "rich", the really "rich" one, and I certainly do not refer to those who perceive the aforementioned seventy-five thousand euros a year, fears the anger of the "poor", and the only way he knows to avoid it, is that of directing that charge of miserable and desperate anger towards “other” social objectives which, although on the whole fairly and timidly well-off, nevertheless also suffer, albeit to a limited extent, the repercussions of economic and social instability. Call it "equity" or in any other way the concept of the fund does not change. However, the impact that such a measure can have on a large part of the middle class changes, that is precisely that class that, to sum up, has suffered most from the economic upheavals generated by the pandemic health crisis. All the more so when one is perfectly aware that a moment of strong crisis and / or emergency was countered to every “asset”. And even more so, when we want to remember the traumatic effect that in the distant, but not too much, 1992, during the Amato government, had the forced withdrawal of 6 per thousand in a single tranche from all the citizens' accounts to face the crisis of the lira. Not to mention, then, coming to more recent times, the application of the stamp duty on current accounts during the Monti government, in 2011, and the contextual reintroduction of the ICI-IMU on the first home.
If this is the case, then, and to reconnect with the wisdom of Winston Churchill, how could we rightly believe that we could introduce a new patrimonial, albeit disguised, one-off or periodic, to pay off the debts that the State is contracting in order to favor the economic recovery, or rather, a presumed, albeit uncertain, economic recovery? If even Mario Draghi, like others who preceded him, is unable to find alternative solutions then, I have the impression, probably more than founded (although the conditional is a must), that the operation carried out a few months ago by our President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella had very different objectives and purposes than those announced, and certainly completely useless and / or of any favorable practical impact on the socio-economic level. Yet, Mr. “Whatever it takes”, upon his pompous inauguration, had thundered with confidence that “this is not (now) the time to take money from citizens but to give it”.
All stories in evidence: usual proclamations without consistency useful to create a legitimate trust punctually betrayed in practice. Let's be clear: no one with a minimum of discernment and undisputed good faith could ever come to believe that they do not have to do anything to support those in need. However, in the specific case, the paradox is ideological even before conceptual-juridical: in the meantime, to be the so-called "patrimonial" considered, in whatever form it occurs, as an instrument of "social justice" capable of justifying, in time of crisis, the extraordinary "sacrifice" of the richest for the benefit of the poorest; therefore, to be, that same "patrimonial", and from a different point of view, absolutely unjust due to the fact that it is configured as a "second tax" imposed on assets accumulated through income already subject to taxation.
There is no one who does not see the underlying misunderstanding. Because to say it all, and more correctly, it is only and solely the State that must intervene to keep rich and poor unharmed from the devastating effects of the crisis, and certainly not by drawing from the pockets of the Italian people who, in 80% of cases, it survives from pensions and salaries that are certainly not high and, therefore, unsuitable to support an extraordinary tax.
Mario Draghi or not Mario Draghi, “patrimonial” as a response to the crisis, and not only that, is always and in any case a tax that is not only useless but also harmful because it tends to depress the economy. Luigi Einaudi docet.
Giuseppina Di Salvatore - Lawyer, Nuoro