In world news (here), the draft budget for 2022 in Italy still endorses gender discrimination in the form of the tampon tax, but decreases the VAT from 22% to 10%. Governments continue to generate money from the literal bodies of those who need these products to manage an involuntary biological process.
Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s cabinet on Tuesday passed a draft budget for 2022 worth some 23 billion euros (26.7 billion U.S. dollars), which would deliver expansionary measures including a sharp cut in income taxes.
The draft indicates the main policy framework the government intends to follow for next year, including the targeted budget balance and the projections for expenditure and revenue.
The budget aims at boosting Italy’s growth to 4.7 percent next year, according to the forecast provided by the Economy and Finance Ministry in late September. * * *
Overall, the government set aside some eight billion euros to implement the tax cut. The measure would be mainly devoted to decreasing the tax wedge, namely the difference between the total labor costs borne by an employer and the net take home pay of a single average worker.
Despite having partially reduced it recently, Italy still showed the fifth highest tax wedge — amounting to 46 percent of total labor costs — among the 37 countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2020.
The cabinet approved a cut from 22 percent to 10 percent of the so-called tampon tax, meaning the value-added tax charged on feminine hygiene products such as tampons.
The draft budget also included stimulus measures to help the euro-zone’s third largest economy keep recovering from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
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