Italian welfare, accounts to be restored

When it is necessary to “generate cash”, and for the European Governments severely hit by the economic crisis this is now extremely important, welfare services become the perfect victims to be sacrificed. In Italy, however, the situation is particularly complicated because, in spite of a public expenditure in line with the European average, the national law on this matter is quite irregular and ineffective. Thus, the Italian Government has around 160 billion euro (facilities, services, etc.) which cannot be cut without a scrupulous reform. The simple cut of the existing resources, indeed, would contribute to worsening the Italian anomaly, which sees the lack of effective measures aiming at helping the poorest, different benefits for equal needs and a means testing system distorted by a high level of tax evasion.

We are, therefore, far away from any model of “selective” service universalism, based on how much a person can actually afford to pay, which is the common heritage of social Europe. An important step forward was taken more than ten years ago with the enforcement of the Law No. 328, which defined at the national level the basic social assistance thresholds. Such a law, however, lost its original sense of purpose after the approval of constitutional federalism, which created a wide range of regional welfare systems without funds, mostly allocated to central Government.

It is quite evident, therefore, that the only way for gathering resources, without destroying the general assistance system, is that of implementing a number of manoeuvres aiming at:

-creating universal supporting measures which are valid at the national level;
-ensuring the access to such measures for all citizens, asking them to contribute according to the possibilities open to them;
-launching effective actions against tax evasion and false declarations;

This is what must be done in the short term, in response to the financial emergency. Then, it will be better to discuss about the effectiveness and rightness of means testing. Clearly, as Paul Krugman has recently observed, this system is much unfairer than that based on the funding of assistance services through charging, because it negatively impacts on the so called “grey group”, those people who are not poor but who might be, because of constant demand of contribution “according to the possibilities open to them”. In this field, the right path to follow is that of simplification and uniformity. Only in this way it will be possible to respect the principles of solidarity and social justice representing the foundation of progress.