Irpef, 42.9 per cent of discounts go to incomes above 50,000 euro
Individuals. The 2.88 million Italians in the third tax bracket will absorb 1.27 billion of the 2.96 billion dedicated to the tax rate cut. The stop to benefits at 200,000 euro saves 12.6 million
by Marco Mobili and Gianni Trovati
The mechanism that will cancel the new Irpef discounts when the income exceeds 200,000 euro gross per year has little more than a symbolic value. The savings attributed by the technical report to the budget law to the cut, which in practice removes the 440 euro offered by the lightened rate from the deductions, stops at 12.6 million per year: that is, 0.43% of the 2.96 billion euro of lower revenue that will be determined each year by the new rate architecture.
These figures are enough to indicate the reasons that prompted the government to reintroduce this form of sterilisation, which, moreover, strikes somewhat at random because it excludes those who, having no costs to deduct in their declarations, will not offer the IRS any basket on which to exercise the scissors. Having no perceptible impact on public accounts, the rule serves to avoid controversy over the mini tax gift to the 'rich', that is, to that handful of not even 146,000 taxpayers (0.34% of the total) who stand out in the income hierarchy, or at least in their official photograph taken with their declarations.
Conceived in this way, however, the cap on rebates does not change the structure of the most popular measure of the manoeuvre one iota, which with its two-point adjustment to the second tax rate, reduced from 35% to 33%, focuses more directly on taxpayers in the middle bracket, i.e. the almost 10 million Italians with tax returns of between €28,000 and €50,000 gross per year; but in reality it extends its effects far beyond those borders, affecting almost 13.6 million people, as explained by Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti the other day in the Chamber of Deputies.
The so-called 'middle class', the object of the government's explicit attention, is one of the least defined entities in our economic system. But there is no doubt that its boundaries go far beyond the 50,000 euro income that in Italy, the only one among the large economies, triggers the highest marginal tax rate, the same rate that applies even to the very few six-figure earnings written in declarations. This is why the Ministry of the Economy chose to place the ceiling on the discount so high, with the aim of giving a signal to those who, often thanks to above-average tax loyalty, have travelled (and will continue to travel) at record levels of taxation.
The system now brought to the attention of Parliament, which is unlikely to change it unless it manages to find elsewhere the two billion a year needed to extend the 33% rate up to 60,000 euro of income as demanded in particular by Forza Italia (and by Luigi Marattin's Pld in opposition), has some consequences.
