Squatting and perpetual benefits abuse are rampant in Italy. The culprits are largely Italian. However, parallel to this system of living off the state, there are millions of migrants receiving public benefits. Photo courtesy of Altalex. Rome’s city council is preparing to spend public money rehousing hundreds of people who spent more than a decade living rent-free in a squatted building that the government failed to clear for years, a failure that has already cost Italian taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.The roughly 400 residents of Spin Time Labs, a nine-story former state office block in Rome’s Esquilino district, were evicted at the end of July after a fire broke out in the building, prompting safety inspections and a judicial seizure order. The structure originally belonged to INPDAP, Italy’s now-dissolved social security agency for public employees, which abandoned it in 2010. It was later sold to a private real estate fund, Investire SGR, which spent the next several years trying, unsuccessfully, to reclaim its own property from squatters who moved in during 2013.Across the country, there are an estimated 50,000 squatter-occupied properties. The Italian government’s failure to enforce owners’ legal rights comes with a massive price tag. A December 2025 court ruling ordered Italy’s Interior Ministry to pay the owners, Investire SGR, $24.8 million (€21.18 million) in arrears, plus a further $242,000 (€207,000) per month, as compensation for the state’s years-long refusal to clear the occupation.In other words, taxpayers were already on the hook for the government’s failure to uphold private property rights before a single euro was spent rehousing the people responsible for occupying it.Now more public money is about to hemorrhage. With the council’s offer to buy the building from Investire SGR rejected outright, Mayor Roberto Gualtieri has pledged that city authorities will offer “dignified accommodation” to the displaced residents. The first public housing allocations are expected within roughly 60 days for those who qualify, reportedly including placement in the same city borough and guaranteed school transport.This situation is not unique in Italy, where squatting has become an occupation enabled by a social system supported by extremely high income taxes. Rome’s city government used public funds to purchase 98 apartments at Porto Fluviale for more than $25.7 million (€22 million) and spent roughly $585,000 (half a million euros) on utility costs at a former squatter colony building in Ostia.Liberals will claim that the state did not pay the rent and electricity bills for the squatters because there is evidence that they were being charged for utilities and rent and that the bills went unpaid. However, from a pure dollars-and-cents standpoint, after the eviction, the state is now covering those costs using public money. The government failed to clear the building for over a decade, a court ordered a payout in the tens of millions to compensate the owner for that failure, and now the municipality has pledged to place the evicted occupants in public housing paid for by Roman taxpayers.Roberto Gualtieri, the mayor of Rome, has framed the episode as proof of “a failure of Italy’s Second Republic, which stripped away a pillar of welfare.” This is typical socialist language, vilifying landlords while supporting those who refuse to pay rent and utilities.Italy’s right, including Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party, sees it differently. Federico Rocca, a Fratelli d’Italia city councillor and president of Rome’s Transparency Commission, made this statement after the purchase deal collapsed: “Finally, on the Spin Time matter, legality and respect for the rules wins — those rules that for years were trampled on, with the complicity of the Gualtieri administration,” Rocca said, adding that Roman taxpayers’ money had been saved “from yet another unacceptable operation.”He went on to note that the property has already cost the public purse over $25.7 million (€22 million), on top of separate sums spent on other formerly occupied properties.Yes. The repetition is mainly between “expansive social benefits programs” at the end of the fourth paragraph and the opening of the new paragraph. I would combine them so the statistics immediately substantiate the point.Benefits use and abuse in Italy are widespread, driven in part by extremely low wages and a high tax burden. Italian workers earn a fraction of their American counterparts, an average of $36,600 a year compared to $82,932 in the United States.That gap is compounded by one of the steepest labor tax burdens in the developed world. Italy’s average tax wedge on a single worker’s wages sits at 45.8%, and the marginal tax wedge, the rate applied to any additional income, reaches 72.8%, among the highest in the OECD. Employers face their own burden, with social security contributions alone consuming more than a fifth of total labor costs, pushing up the cost of hiring and suppressing wages further.There are millions of migrants in Italy who disproportionately receive public benefits. Although foreign nationals account for only about 9% of Italy’s population, they represent 30% of recipients in some benefit categories and 45% or more of new public housing assignments in several major cities. Photo courtesy of Ggia, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.Millions of migrants in Italy, now numbering 5.56 million and comprising 9.4% of the population, add a further source of downward wage pressure, as they are often willing to accept lower pay than native workers in a market already strained by high employment costs.The taxes extracted from Italian workers’ wages fund one of the largest social benefits systems in Europe, though no single official statistic captures the full scope, since different programs are tracked separately by different agencies and this analysis excludes healthcare and pensions.Total social protection spending, including pensions, healthcare, and social assistance combined, reached €587.5 billion in 2024, or 26.8% of GDP and 59.3% of the state’s current spending.The primary poverty benefit, Assegno di Inclusione, covered 935,675 households and 2.23 million individuals as of December 2025, roughly 3.8% of the country’s 58.9 million residents. Unemployment benefits reach a far larger population: NASpI paid out to over 2.8 million beneficiaries in 2025, at a cost of nearly €18 billion.Disability assistance is larger still. As of January 2026, 4.4 million people received an assistance-category pension, the large majority tied to civil disability status, at a combined cost of €28.5 billion a year.Layered on top of these three programs are additional supports for those who exhaust unemployment benefits or remain outside the active labor force, along with separate reception and integration allowances for newly arrived migrants and asylum seekers, funded through the national reception system (SAI). Taken together, a substantial share of Italy’s working-age population draws some form of government support, even before pensions or healthcare are counted at all.Separate from the scale question is who receives these benefits. Foreign nationals made up 9.4% of Italy’s population by January 2026, up from 9.2% a year earlier. Their share of benefit receipt is disproportionately large across many categories of benefits. On ADI, foreign-headed households represent only about 9% of recipients, close to their population share, but far below their 31% share of households in absolute poverty, largely because ADI requires five years of Italian residency, with the last two continuous, which excludes many lower-income migrant households by design.Social housing runs the opposite direction. A 2016 national census put foreign nationals at 8.3% of the population but represented 12.8% of all case popolari residents overall, but new assignments in several major cities run far higher. Today, foreign households secured 51% of new placements in Perugia, 49% in Bologna, 48% in Turin, 47% in Florence, and 45 to 46% in Milan and Bergamo, driven by points systems that weight family size and low income over length of residency.What ties this back to the tax burden and low wages is that social contributions and labor taxes account for over 45% of the cost of employing an average Italian worker, one of the highest such burdens in the OECD. Given the scale of ADI, NASpI, disability assistance, and reception spending documented above, that revenue is clearly funding a very large system.The odd, circular logic of socialist programs is that broad social programs require heavy tax funding, and adding migrants to the mix exacerbates the problem. As taxes go up, net salaries decline, disincentivizing work while encouraging benefits use and abuse. This, in turn, adds to the state’s social benefits costs, which drives up taxes, and the entire economy continues to spiral downward.The post Socialism at Its Finest: Rome Government Will Use Taxpayer Money to House Recently Evicted Squatters appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.