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Editorial Board
December 30, 2020 06:04
Cash must be returned to Brussels. The latest version of the Italian Recovery Fund plan foresees spending 4.75 billion euros on digital payments, a figure that is equivalent to half of what will go to healthcare. But that money, as part of the Recovery Plan, will be borrowed from the European Union and therefore will have to be paid back.
The cashback hoax: the money to be returned to Brussels
Today Il Messaggero speaks in an article by Luca Cifoni and Francesco Bisozzi: the Christmas cashback of the first two weeks of life involved five million Italians who, however, have accumulated a reimbursement fee of only 18 euros each. . According to government forecasts, the plan may mean additional revenue for the state equivalent to 4,500 million euros in 2025, thanks to the increase in electronic payments and the emergence of the underground. However, judging from the prologue, the road seems uphill. For the reimbursement, the government has planned to spend 1.75 billion in 2021 and 3 billion in 2022. And 228 million is allocated to the extra Christmas rebate.
But since the $ 4.75 billion the government has planned to spend is part of the loan share, and not the grants, the government is preparing to borrow from Europe to fund future repayments of cashless payments. And very important, given that, as the newspaper points out, the Italia Cashless plan will absorb 4 billion more than what will be allocated to the organizational innovation of the Justice. But it gets worse: the cashback operation has raised some perplexities in Europe and also in the ECB: former board member Yves Mersch on the last day of his mandate, on December 14, expressed his perplexities in a letter addressed to the Minister of Economy Roberto Gualtieri.
The criticisms were quickly returned to the sender from Rome, but the truth is that the figures registered so far by the initiative are not satisfactory. The difficulties of the Io application certainly weighed, which in the take-off phase did not facilitate the registration in the program, to the point that approximately half of those who downloaded the public application have not yet subscribed to the refund. Then, the anti-contagion closures these days have helped keep the proportion of reimbursements accumulated by participants low, making the program less attractive.
