Budget, lower taxes for those who have children but there is nothing written in black and white
Lower taxes for those who have children. This is how the idea communicated by the minister can be translated – but there is still nothing “in black and white” Georgette these days. It is well established that the birth rate is a national emergency. It was understood late, but now it is part of a “common feeling” who ended up putting aside a mainstream resistant, who saw in the proliferation a sign of retrograde culture, catholic-conservative.
The subjects convincing are almost always the economic ones. It has been understood that fewer births will mean fewer workers, therefore less tax revenue, less payments contributory pensions, and therefore leaner pensions and an increasingly fragile public budget, given that – together with the collapse in the birth rate – there is an incessant increase in life expectancy: people live longer, get sick more, and consume more pension payments.
The reasoning may seem cynical, but it should be convincing: fewer births means less overall welfare for everyone. Who will pay our pensions? Who will help pay for the national health system? Thedemographic trend seems incorrigible. Projecting the cumulative data from theIstat in the first half of this year, we could risk another negative record at the end of the year: 5 thousand fewer births than in 2023, which had recorded the negative record with 379 thousand births during the year (there were 393 thousand in 2022).
A new one cultural approach and a new orientation of social organization are destined to bear fruit very slowly. Helping those who will bring new creatures into the world is essential, for example by increasing places in nursery schools. It is a pity, however, that one of the cuts to the PNRR projects concerned investments in nursery school places, which went from over 260 thousand in the original plan to 160 thousand.
So the road of that sort of “family quotient for deductions” suggested by Giorgetti could be the right path? A preliminary consideration: it continues to be curious that government proposals are communicated through the press and not in the Council of Ministers. The two deputy prime ministers have let the newspapers know that they “have asked” for this and that. But why announce it to the newspapers and not define it as government practice? The head of the Mefmore than anyone else, should have convincing weapons to make his ideas walk, if shared. And if they are not shared, why submit them to the media theater? Just to be able to say (later): I would have liked to do it differently, they prevented me?
Cut taxes for those who have children it has a cost for the Treasury. It depends on how much is cut and for how many children. Estimates speak of a total cost of the measure between 5 and 6 billion euros. Georgette seems determined to bet on the birth rate front: we need to recognize a “social value” to those who start a family and to those who have children. Fine. But only with the umpteenth “tax expenditure”? Families need real money to pay for daycare, health care, diapers and baby food, and then to send their children to school, with books and notebooks and computers.
The answer that immediately comes to mind, faced with this banal shopping list (not of tax discounts), is only one: there is no money. We learned it at school: money demands priorities. The illusion that there is everything for everyone has vanished. Is the low birth rate a national emergency? It must become a priority. Perhaps shared between the Government and the opposition – all the Emergencies nationals need unity of purpose – but the opposition’s attention seems to be focused on Jobs act, on health care cuts and programs Pnrr. All right, but birth rates and young people should remain at the top of the list of problems to be solved.
The help of the press, in this attention to be turned on incessantly, could be useful. The “watchdog” also serves this purpose. And instead the gossip and superficiality: the toto-nominations at Rai, or the choice of the candidate for the Liguria elections, occupy the spaces that force the demographic emergency to accommodate some low cut. Let’s try to repeat it: who will pay our pensions?
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