Inequality does not always come with the face of extreme poverty. It’s not just the distance between those who have a lot and those who have little. In today’s society it often enters through the most ordinary door: a paycheck that loses purchasing power, an expired contract, a burdensome rent, a child who puts off a project, an elderly person who uses up savings.
It is a silent, administrative, almost domestic inequality. Precisely for this reason it is more dangerous: because it always ends up appearing normal, to create conditions of waiting.
The last one Annual report of the Bank of Italy offers a decisive starting point. Collective bargaining remains one of the civil pillars of Italian work, but today it shows cracks that produce inequality. In national collective agreements, once the agreement expires, there is no deadline within which the renewal must take place; during the “contractual holiday” the table minimums are not updated and the real salary erodes. Between 2020 and 2025, delays affected 86 percent of agreements; inflation catch-up clauses apply to only one in five workers. AND the distance between sectors is strong: the average holiday was around six months in industry, but exceeded twenty months in services.
A contract that has expired for too long is not just a negotiation technique: it is justice suspended.
The data fits into a wider wound. The Bank of Italy also reports that between 2019 and 2023 the inequality of equivalent labor income increased; in 2024 the Gini of disposable income fell to 31.0 percent, but absolute poverty remained at 8.4 percent. The paradox is clear: some public corrective measures reduce measured inequality, but do not restore to everyone the concrete ability to live without fear. A family that eats, keeps warm, takes care of itself and pays the rent does not live on an index: it lives on prices.
Here the tax question becomes moral. Not because taxes are good or bad in themselves, but to say on whose shoulders we place the weight of the common home, which forms of wealth we consider untouchable and which lives we leave more exposed to the fatigue of living. The data from the 2024 Irpef declarations show that employment and pensions account for 84 percent of the total declared income; and almost 86 percent of the net income tax. Employed labor, taxed at source, is the most visible taxpayer; other forms of income live in substitute or separate systems: around two million taxpayers are in the flat rate, with a substitute tax of 15 or 5 percent; many qualified financial incomes remain outside the progressive Irpef and are taxed at 26 percent. It is not illegality: it is an asymmetry of treatment that has been present for many years and which is difficult to discuss.
All this must be inserted into an even more general framework.
In 2025, the Italian tax wedge on the average-wage single worker is equal to 45.8 percent of the cost of labor, compared to the OECD average of 35.1 percent. This means that work costs too much for those who hire it and pays too little for those who live on the salary.
Wealth, meanwhile, remains very concentrated. In Italy, the richest 10 percent hold 60.6 percent of net assets; the less well-off half is just 7 percent – a fragile and declining share, a sign that the growth of wealth continues not to be distributed, but is gathering.
However, heritage is not a fault: it is security, memory, savings, freedom. But when the starting point weighs more than the journey, merit becomes a fragile word. Aristotle would have said that justice does not mean treating everyone as identical, but according to proportion; Rawls reminds us that inequalities are justifiable only if they improve the conditions of those who are worse off. A society is not just when everyone arrives at the same place, but when no one is born already defeated.
This is why it is not enough to say “more taxes” or “less taxes”. The more serious question is another: what justice do we want to write into the public budget? Taxes are not just a levy; they are the way in which a community decides which hardships to recognise, which incomes to correct, which fragilities to protect and which possibilities to restore to those who risk having none.
The direction should be clear: renew contracts in certain times, protect low and medium wages from inflation, permanently reduce the tax burden on work, bring income and replacement schemes back to greater progressive coherence, fight tax evasion and finance public services that are real freedom, not residual assistance.
Finally, healthcare, education, nursery schools and social housing are not simple items of expenditure: they are the moral infrastructures of a democracy. Scientific literature has long reported how these services significantly reduce various forms of inequality; health and education explain a large part of this impact, having always represented the most important driving force for the weakest sections of the population. But the point is not just statistical. A good school is the fairest inheritance tax, because it corrects at least in part the birth lottery. Universal healthcare is an invisible wage, because it prevents illness from becoming a tax on the poor.
The Gospel does not prescribe rates, he doesn’t draw brackets, he doesn’t compile budget laws. But he often educates his gaze. He asks us to look at society not from the point of view of those who can wait, negotiate, absorb an increase in prices, but from the threshold of those who no longer have a margin. In the parable of the Samaritan the decisive question is not who has the most refined theory on justice, but who will stop in front of those left on the ground. Translated into public life, this means that contracts, wages, taxes, income and services are not neutral mechanisms: they are concrete ways of becoming neighbor, or of moving on.
The social doctrine of the Church calls all this dignity of the person, universal destination of goods, preferential option for the poor and common good. Political philosophy calls it justice. Families call it in simpler words: living without fear.
For this reason the decisive question is not only how much Italy produces, but for those who produce, with what dignity and with what distribution of possibilities. A democracy decays when it asks the fragile for patience and the strong only for efficiency. Inequality becomes intolerable when it transforms birth into destiny, the contract into expectation, the tax into surrender. Justice begins before major reforms: it begins the moment a society decides that work cannot be the place where poverty arises. Those who work should not apologize for being poor. It is society that must ask itself why it allows this.
