On December 16, like every year, millions of owners “will be obliged to pay the IMU balance, a tax that affects not what you earn, but what you own”. As underlined by the lawyer Sandro Scoppa, president of Confedilizia Calabria, it is not a contribution linked to an activity or an income, but a “withdrawal that weighs exclusively on the fact of having a registered asset, regardless of its profitability, its use or its actual valorisation”.
Taxed fragility: the extreme case of Calabria
The situation is “even more significant” in Calabria. In the five capitals – Catanzaro, Reggio Calabria, Cosenza, Crotone and Vibo Valentia – the rate is set at the maximum level allowed by law, 10.6 per thousand. Scoppa speaks of “a full tax on goods that, in most cases, produce nothing”.
“No distinction is made between those who rent and those who cannot, between those who earn and those who don’t”. The IMU “is applied in any case, in a blind, rigid, constant way”, and weighs “often on unused properties, on vacant premises, on inherited homes that find neither a market nor use”. It is “the paradox of an imposition that claims to affect wealth, but ends up burdening fragility”.
Ownership or burden? the political crux of property taxation
The IMU has become the “main form of permanent property taxation in our system. And this is, in itself, a political and cultural problem, even before a technical one”. Taxing the same asset every year, regardless of its ability to generate income, means “denying the principle of proportionality and violating the very logic of taxation. It is equivalent to punishing the simple fact of owning something, and transforming assets into a burden, rather than a resource”.
In the Calabrian territory, all this “takes on even more evident features”. In most cases, the properties affected by the IMU are “the fruit of family savings”, assets which “are not attractive on the market today, which find no buyers or tenants, but which continue to be treated as if they were certain and automatic sources of income”.
Beyond revision: the call for complete abolition
Faced with this reality, the lawyer Scoppa is categorical: we cannot speak of “adjustments or partial revisions. The IMU is not a measure to be corrected or attenuated: it must be completely overcome”. The withdrawal is “disconnected from the production of wealth, which effectively translates into a form of expropriation diluted over time”.
Such a tax is “incompatible with a fair tax system, based on individual responsibility and respect for property”. “The house cannot be considered a pretext for making money, but must return to being recognized as an asset to be protected, not to be attacked.”
Finally, the president of Confedilizia Calabria concludes: “Property is not a luxury to be taxed, but an essential component of family and civil life”. For this reason, “it is necessary to continue to demand with determination the abolition of the IMU”, reiterating that “no society can prosper if it taxes savings and penalizes those who conserve, those who invest, those who pass on”.