The latest alarm was launched on Tuesday 13 September by the Parliamentary Budget Office with a substantial request for clarity from the government on the thorny question of the impact on public accounts of the greater indexation of checks to be guaranteed to pensioners due to the soaring consumer prices. . The automatic reassessment of social security payments, scheduled every year in January, is one of the first thorns that the government that will be formed after the elections on 25 September will have to deal with.
The first effects of inflation
Also because in recent weeks the first estimates on the effect of expensive life on social security outlays have aroused more than one concern among the technicians of the State General Accounting and of theInps. The impact on pension expenditure of an inflation above 8% would be no less than 25 billion.
With the consequence of mortgaging at least 8-10 billion of the budget law for 2023. Which will be added to the higher costs already foreseen under current legislation (absorbed in the forecasts of the April Def) and to the mini-dowry, to be borne by the budget 2022, allocated by the government with the Aid bis decree to guarantee in October a first advance of 2% of the revaluations of the treatments for the audience only under 35 thousand euros of annual income.
The indications of the Accounting Office
Already at the end of July the Accounting Office had indicated, in the usual update of the medium-long term trends of the pension system, the increase in social security expenditure for the next two years under the pressure of high living costs at + 0.7% of GDP. And the technicians of via XX Settembre had also pointed out that the fallout from this surge in inflation would have been reabsorbed over a period of twenty years, producing an average “burden” growth of 0.4% of GDP precisely in the period between 2022 and 2045.
A scenario that, due to the slowdown in the economy expected in the coming months, could worsen further. In the context of the update note to the Def that the Draghi government is about to present, the forecast on the growth of pension expenditure next year could be revised upwards. Which, in the latest projections of the Accounting Department, is given to 16.2% of GDP: 0.5 percentage points more than the 15.7% indicated for 2022.