Abstract

We try to reconstruct the reform design of the personal income tax on the basis of the few pieces of information so far provided by the Government, paying a particular attention to the structure of the deduction which should decrease linearly with income, in the context of the ideal model of the Flat Rate Tax. The analysis of the budgetary, distributional and efficiency effects, made with a static tax-benefit model, highlights poor results in terms of inequality changes and perhaps a lower than expected reduction in the effective marginal tax rates. The flat rate tax model turns out to be clearly unfit to provide support to the most disadvantaged households. The paper ends with some suggestions on possible alternative reforms.