The state that taxes you twice
Security, pensions, healthcare: you pay the state for entitlement, then pay privately to avoid going without. Filling the gaps has become the system.
The Italian practises professionally a sport almost unknown elsewhere: self-taxation. Despite living under one of Europe’s heaviest tax burdens, the Italian — yes, with a capital ‘I’ — must buy again what he has already handsomely purchased. He does so through a tax recorded on no F24 [Italy’s tax payment form], contemplated by no tax code, yet levied with implacable punctuality. It is the hidden levy on service failure: you pay for a service, receive it in truncated form, then buy it again elsewhere. At full price.
Take security. In Rome, a stone’s throw from the Trevi Fountain, some twenty shopkeepers on Via del Lavatore — Il Tempo reports — have joined forces to fund private security against fraudsters and petty crime. Not to replace the police, they politely explain. But politeness does not erase the substance: those who work pay the state their share, then pay a second time simply to be able to work. Where public authority retreats, the citizen’s wallet advances.
Take pensions. You contribute for forty years, then learn that the public pension alone may not be enough to maintain a decent standard of living, and that supplementary provision will become increasingly decisive in the coming decades. Translated: having financed the compulsory system, the prudent citizen must build a second lifeboat. Those who can. Those who cannot must fend for themselves.
Take health. You fund the National Health Service, then knock on the private sector’s door for an appointment within a decent time. In the first four months of 2026, according to Agenas [Italy’s national agency for regional health services] figures reported by Quotidiano Sanità, around two million consultations and tests remain outside guaranteed waiting times. The OECD captures a deeply uncomfortable truth: many Italian families already pay for healthcare through taxes, but when they actually need treatment they are forced to reach into their pockets, often to the point of jeopardising the household budget.
This is not polemic. It is moral accounting.
And it is an accounting unlikely to move those who decide from afar, protected by assured salaries, punctual reimbursements, sealed diaries and preferential channels not always declared but often perceived. Ordinary citizens, by contrast, do not live on institutional perceptions. They live with waiting, bills, contributions, postponed appointments, shopfronts to protect, old age to fund.
The fiscal pact rests on an elementary promise: you pay a lot, but receive what you need. When instead you pay a lot and must then buy security, pensions and health all over again, welfare no longer exists: what exists is the forced duplication of household expenditure. And those who suffer it cease to feel like citizens. They become subjects paying tribute.
There are ways out, requiring not rhetoric but steady nerves. First: where the state fails to guarantee sufficient protection, documented security expenses for businesses, blocks of flats and exposed areas should qualify for tax credits. This is no gift; it is restitution.
Second: automatic, simple, portable supplementary pensions, with supervised charges and a strong tax incentive for the young, the self-employed and middle earners. Old age cannot become a lottery for the well-informed alone.
Third: genuinely enforceable healthcare waiting times. If the public service overruns, access to accredited private providers must be available without paying twice. A right already paid for, not a concession bestowed.
And there are many other possible legislative measures. For now, these will suffice.
The taxpayer asks for no wonders. He demands something older and sterner: that what he has paid return to him in real services. Everything else is a levy dressed up as civilisation.