With the return to school, the beginning of the championship and so on, the period in which the government prepares the financial maneuver also returns. And with the budget law for the year that will also come back the rebus of pensions. Rebus because – from 2011 onwards, with the Fornero reform – the center -right has constantly pushed to loosen the constraints that lead to collecting the pension allowance and further on with the years. In other words, a large slice of the Italian electorate is regularly proposed a pension advance. Also this year is taking place like this. With two issues. The first is to freeze the increase in life expectancy, which would bring the retirement age from 67 to 67 and three months. The second is to use the TFR – which for those who have worked in companies with over 50 employees are filed with the INPS – to retire 3 years before expected: at 64 years instead of 67.
The possible option, however, concerns who is at least 25 years of contribution and does not reach a pension equal to at least three times the minimum one (it means at least 1,616 euros per month). In addition, the “TFR-64” option would also be extended to those who have been working before 1996 and those who do not have forms of supplementary pension, (where for these categories there have already been the possibility of going out at 64 years). Upstream there is a consideration to make: to use the severance pay to anticipate the pension is equivalent to paying the cost with its salary, since the severance pay is nothing more than a part of the salary that the employer sets over the years. Everyone can make use of it, but the concept must be clear.
After that the point that interests us – both with regard to the three months of expectation to be frozen and regarding the severance pay – is precisely what inspires these measures: we wonder if it is appropriate to insist on the pension advances, which still have and always costs for the community (the only freezing of age is worth 20 billion more of public debt from here to 2045). Is this really what we want, that the Italians want most?
We think that the financial prudence imposed so far by the Minister of Economy Giorgetti is the main reason for the newfound harmony on international markets. That same harmony that instead has lost a nation like France, struggling with increasingly disastrous public accounts and at all willing to carry out cuts in spending. But at the same time we also think that the virtuosity of our public finances (which net of interest expenditure present a primary surplus) can be better exploited from the income side, through a new cut of the tax rates that allow greater expense to those who work and earn a little. Of course, the idea of retiring to 67 and more years does not make anyone happy.
But if you think that a man born 67 years ago, in 1958, he had a life expectancy of 65-66 years, against 77 of those born in 2000 and about 83 of those who were born in 2019, the idea of being at work up to the terms expected can even appear as a fortune. Linked to the success of science and destined to last longer.