Escape from the basic income, the squeeze and then the peak requests – Corriere.it

“The basic income was more effective” than the subsidies that will replace it, i.e. the inclusion allowance and support for training and work, ruled Pasquale Tridico, father of the measure and precisely for this reason torpedoed by the INPS presidency from Meloni government. If by effectiveness of the instrument we mean the degree of coverage of the same, Tridico is right, in the sense that the reform of the basic income will produce a substantial reduction in the diffusion of the subsidy to the poor, as explained by the government’s technical report. If by effectiveness you mean instead the ability to intervene in the most appropriate way with respect to the characteristics and needs of the interested partiesit is early to say, in the sense that the results that the Meloni reform will have will have to be compared with those of the Income, which we already know.

The questions slow down

Let’s start with the diffusion. The Income has known, in its 4 years of existence, a parabola. 1.1 million families benefited from it in the first year, (April-December 2019), slowly climbed to a peak of 1.7 million in 2021, also due to the economic crisis triggered by Covid, and then gradually decreased to 956,000 last April. You have to go back to February 2020 to find a similar level: effect of the recovery, but even more of the tightening of controls. Initially these were mostly post-subsidy and sample based. Only when the agreements for crossing the databases were concluded were the checks carried out earlier, according to the provisions of the 2022 Budget Law (Draghi government), and this led to an increase in rejected applications. Then there was the 2023 Budget Law, the first of the Meloni government, which decreed the end of the Income, which would have been replaced, from 2024, by the new instruments envisaged by the reform. The combination of the improvement of controls and the announcement effect on the reform has produced a sharp slowdown in applications, which fell to 366 thousand in the first quarter of this year compared to 485 thousand in the same period of 2022, 24.5% less .

What will happen from 2024? From reading the technical report, it can be seen that 436,000 families, for a total of 615,000 people, will no longer be covered by the basic income, i.e. approximately one in 3 families and one in 4 people. However, the government estimates that 322,000 people, in practice one in two who can be employed, will receive training support of 350 euros per month, because they will participate in a training course or similar initiative. Forecasts that the same technicians who formulated them, with microphones off, consider very optimistic. In any case, the number of people who can be employed will decrease from year to year, as the Support is not a repeatable service. And from 2027 onwards they will not exceed 133,000, estimates the government. So most of the theoretically employable will have to make do. As it did before the income. Which means: working illegally, living off their wits, getting help from the Church and voluntary associations. According to the opponents of the reform, it is a substantial renunciation of the state to protect a part of the poor, punished for not working even if this does not depend on them, in contrast with the most recent recommendations of the EU Commission to all member states to equip itself with a universal tool to combat poverty. The defenders of the squeeze, on the other hand, even if they don’t declare it openly, think that these poor people often already work, but illegally, and that up to now they have accumulated this revenue with the Income.

The two challenges of the government

In reality, according to the official version with which the reform was motivated, the government, having divided the audience of recipients of the intervention into two, employable and non-employable, has faced two challenges to overcome: on the one hand, to support, possibly better than Income, families in absolute poverty who have no job prospects (773,000 in 2024, according to the Technical Report), and on the other to help households who can instead enter the labor market find employment, a point on which the Income has substantially failed.

Even if the reform were to succeed on both fronts, there would still be some inconsistencies, highlighted by experts, which should be corrected and which are the result of the somewhat coarse way in which the two audiences are distinguished, on the basis of age, health conditions and family members. Let’s take an example. A poor family made up of an 18-year-old and a 61-year-old (child and parent living together) falls within the non-employable households (due to the presence of an over 60) and therefore is entitled to the Inclusion Allowance, substantially similar to the Income, while a another family, equally poor, but made up of an 18-year-old and a 59-year-old would only have access to support for training and work, i.e. the check for 350 euros (against 500 from the ADI) and only for the duration of any training course or similar activities and in any case for a maximum of 12 months (against the 18 months of the ADI, renewable). Or: a poor single adult cannot access the ADI because he theoretically falls within the group of employables, while the same adult could access it in the presence of a child. «Maybe it’s a way to boost the birth rate!», tries a joke one of the technicians who worked on the reform.

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