Italy's horse of a different color

  Assertions, assumptions and problems behind inheritance taxes Italy has been plagued this week, as it is periodically, with a flurry of proposals to increase/alter inheritance taxes. It's like living in a country plagued with locusts: you can quietly till your land for between three and seven years, then something inexplicable happens and the cloud you see looming in the distance is not a summer thunderstorm, and it buzzes. This time, the starting shot was given by Mr. Letta, the current Secretary of Partito Democratico, ( PD ), who went public saying that he wanted an increase in inheritance taxation in order to finance some kind of handout to young people, like ten thousand EUR per young person. He was promptly stopped By Draghi in a presser, who said, and I quote, “in a recession we give money, we don't take it”. But amazingly, that wouldn't have been enough to have me write down something. What bugged me into writing this was an interview to La Stampa by Vincenzo V...

  You are kindly required to concentrate on the irrelevant This weekend papers in the EU are chock full of highly placed figures calling for suspension of EU budget rules, but don't be fooled: it never was material to the situation, and neither it is now. I open the papers, and  there is a recurring theme: EU elites want a more extended period of budget rules suspension. European Commissioner Gentiloni first, President Macron , and also German figures, like Co-founder of the G-20 Eichel, are keeping up the pressure with a view to keeping the German High Court from taking an axe to a “World without end” where unchecked deficit allows a political class to spend freely on their goals with no regard to a functioning market economy. However, as much as we can delude ourselves, those budget rules (deficits under 3% and a goal to go back to 60% debt/GDP over twenty years) were NEVER intended to accommodate a market economy at all, far from it. They were a “payment for servi...