“Taxes, the government's right. Local income tax is a scandal.”

“What happens to those with incomes of 50 thousand euros and more is a tax scandal: it insists on a rate that with local additional taxes easily reaches more than 45%, which applies abroad to those who earn 200 or 300 thousand euros.” Italia Viva's economic director Luigi Marattin wrote to Giornale early in the morning after the interview in which Deputy Minister Maurizio Leo opened his doors to those earning 50 thousand euros. “You are absolutely right! However, implementing tax reforms with slogans and not with the head also causes serious distortions. To be credible, he should also explain why when he abolished the second Irpef tranche (reducing the rate for the portion of income between 15 thousand and 28 thousand from 25% to 23%), ruling that those who earn €50,000 do not receive €50,000. They are even entitled to that annual benefit of €240 that would have resulted. In fact, the government reduced the deductible costs that payers could benefit from “They were considered 'too rich' to benefit from any tax cuts. It is a condition I would have expected from Maurizio Landini and Nicola Fratoianni, not from the Meloni government.”

Honorable Member, you are well aware that there is a problem of resources but also the influence of an ambiguous mix of national and local revenues…

“It is the real scandal of our tax system. In Great Britain the rate starts at 45% after £150,000 a year; In France, after 157 thousand euros; In the USA, it doesn't even go there (the cap is 37% for those making up to $600k). Here, anyone who earns 2,500 euros is liable, on each additional euro, to an income tax of up to 46% with the local surcharge, not including social contributions.

This only leads to distortions.

“This year, due to the impact of the tax reform, if an employee who earns 1,800 net euros a month wants to work more, he loses 70 euros a month from his salary. Because after a total of €35,000 per year, all 6 contribution deduction points are suddenly lost. So we get the paradoxical result, which is that the person works and earns more overall, but loses money from the salary. How can a country like this grow with these levels of taxation on the country’s most productive class?”

But isn't this how low-income people are ignored?

“It is insulting to think that these considerations come from a lack of concern for low and middle incomes. For them, the problem is not Irbiev, which has now been almost eliminated. For these incomes, the problem is that the overall salary is low. This is the case with the dynamism of labor productivity, which for a quarter of a century has been a quarter of the EU average each year.

Collections, tax billing and compliance. Do you agree with this “financial revolution”?

“Aggregation is another topic that in Italy is treated as a topic through super curves. Many things are true: that the high tax burden is one of the reasons for tax evasion, as well as that some use it as an excuse because they evade even with taxes of 1%. It is true that it is necessary to push every possible means of cooperation with taxpayers to the maximum (from installment payments to settlement with creditors), but it is also true that if the debt is not repaid after all the guarantee instruments, the serious state has the right to proceed with the process of forced collection with all Tools, as also happens in the very liberal USA. Finally, it is true, as one of the laws I proposed, which no one wants to discuss, says that the government should be obliged to use every euro structurally recovered from reducing the tax gap to reduce the tax burden.

Are there any touchpoints you would vote for, and any corrections?

“We voted for the Malian delegation because, by Leo's own admission, those principles are the same ones that emerged from the parliamentary work I led in the last legislature, in which all parties participated. But among the first executive decrees, we only shared the decrees on sanctions and the preventive agreement, which create the conditions for a practical and effective approach. On other matters, there are a lot of loopholes or shortcomings: I think about the fact that we have funded $16 billion in tax cuts for 2024 alone, which will condemn this government to start every year from “minus 16”. “We will try to blame Europe, but the mistake is the fault of short-sighted politics that is increasingly concerned with the next poll rather than the next generation.”