During the last days of last November, the European Union invited Italy to keep its current expenses under control. From 2001 to today, the current public expenditure of our country has come to constitute around 48% of GDP. The graph accompanying the text demonstrates how there has been an almost constant growth in public spending with two exceptions: the collapse of 2011 – in correspondence with the annus horribilis of the spread in which the bulletin on the BTP-Bund differential opened the editions of every news – and the (milder) descent that began in 2014 and ended in 2017. The latest surge, however, was recorded in 2020. This increase is due on the one hand to the emergency measures issued to deal with the pandemic, from other than the important decrease in GDP observed in the same year. Public expenditures are largely financed by tax revenues: for this reason, the trend relating to the tax burden has also recorded a marked increase from 2001 to today. In particular, on three occasions the tax burden has skyrocketed: the first is in 2006-2007, during the second Prodi government; the second was in 2012, during the public debt crisis (Monti government); the third in 2019-2020, in correspondence with the yellow-green and yellow-red governments, both with grill traction. Welfare measures in support of the weakest sections of the population have probably also contributed to the inflating of the items ‘current public expenditure’ and ‘tax pressure’ in the last two years. The reduction of social inequality is certainly one of the main objectives of a modern state. However, the risk that is run by employing forms of welfarism to rain is that of impoverishing the rest of the population, thus only decreasing the difference between the last and the penultimate, leaving the gap with the former unchanged. The complete analysis by Luca Ricolfi and Fondazione Hume correlated with the comment by the editorial staff of La Ragione are available in today’s issue of the newspaper and forever free of charge on the app and website www.laragione.eu.