The economists of the Bruno Leoni Institute, temple of Italian liberalism, rejected without appeal the proposal of the Dem secretary, Enrico Letta, to create a ‘dowry’ for 18-year-olds by increasing the inheritance tax on assets above one million euros, thus asking “the richest part of the population, 1%, to make a contribution to young people ».
According to Nicola Fiorini, president of the Adam Smith Institute in Verona and author of the focus The inheritance tax between myth and reality. Because Letta is wrong, it is a completely unfair project: «First of all, it is not true – as is often said – that in Italy there is no levy on inheritances, even if this tax guarantees modest income for the treasury. It is true, however, that among the 36 OECD countries there are as many as 12 that really do not have any such taxes. The different taxation on inheritances is largely affected by the tax system as a whole and does not represent a decisive intervention. Among the zero-tax countries there is also Sweden ».
Letta’s goal would be to collect 2.8 million euros to guarantee young people a bonus of 10 thousand euros. According to Fiorini, “it is not true that in Italy nothing is paid on small hereditary assets. In nine out of ten inheritances registered, no inheritance tax is actually paid, because the assets are lower than the deductible, but the mortgage and cadastral tax are paid in return. We are talking about a sum equal to 3% of the cadastral value of the property “, that is the main part of the family assets.
Furthermore, «the 12 OECD states that do not tax inheritances, as many as 10 historically had an inheritance tax and have abolished it in the last twenty years. In most cases, because the tax survived by pure ideological impingement. In Sweden, for example, against a negligible revenue (less than 0.2% of all tax revenues in 2004), there were not only heavy application costs, for the State and for individuals but, above all, the tax it caused other taxes to lose revenue due to the distortions it created and the disincentive to live and invest in the country ”.
Fiorini, then, also raises the distortion between assets in government bonds – tax-free – and real estate assets where land registry taxes amount to 3%: “If one leaves assets of 10 million euros in CCT, his heir must not pay nothing while if another leaves an apartment worth 100,000 euros to his son, the latter must pay 3,000 in taxes ». Furthermore, the expert of the Bruno Leoni Institute underlines the absence of taxation for life insurance policies and notes the issue of succession in the ownership of family businesses, but then focuses on the “dowry” for eighteen-year-olds: “It is a long-standing proposal and discussed worldwide as an integral part of the political-cultural proposal of the new socialist left. On the other hand, the Communist Party Manifesto of 1848 advocated the abolition of the right to dispose of one’s assets by inheritance as a fundamental measure to start the overcoming of capitalism.