Where does the state start taxing on net? The fiscal neutrality point and the subsistence minimum in Europe

The state should not collect net tax from those who live below the subsistence minimum. No system defends violating this principle of nonmaleficence, transposed from principlist ethics to fiscal policy, and no social indicator says where the system starts to collect on net. This article measures that frontier and judges it. The fiscal neutrality point, p*, is the percentile at which the observed net incidence, the balance of direct and indirect taxes against transfers, crosses zero. It is read from the published, anonymous pretax and posttax quantile functions of the World Inequality Database for 2022: of the 35 European countries with both series, the point is identifiable in 23, and the 14 that publish a national subsistence minimum are judged. The income at the crossing is compared with that minimum, transposed to the scale of the distributional accounts. In 9 of the 14 countries the frontier lies above the minimum; in 5 it lies below, and the state collects net tax from those who live below the minimum: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, and Latvia; four are judged against reference budgets and one against an official minimum. Where the frontier lies below the minimum, there is fiscal impoverishment, established without microdata, given the transposition by percentile; without microdata, however, only part of what the system does to those living below it can be detected. The exercise is diagnostic. Once measured and published, the frontier ceases to be an accident: keeping it becomes a decision. Files. (1) The preprint, in the version submitted for publication (fiscal_neutrality_point_preprint.pdf). (2) The same preprint in Portuguese, with the same content (ponto_de_neutralidade_fiscal_preprint.pdf). (3) The replication package (replication_package_1.0.zip), Online Resource 1 of the article: the data extracts, the code and the outputs that reproduce every number the article prints from data, including Tables 1 and 2 and Fig. 1. Start with README.md; the chain runs in Python 3.12, in twelve commands and about ten seconds. Licenses. The preprint, in both languages: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, the license of the World Inequality Database, whose data the article uses. The package: the code under MIT; the outputs under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; the anchored table, the recipes and the documentation under CC BY 4.0, with the third-party values inside them under the terms of their sources (LICENSE.md, Sections 1 and 3); the third-party data under their own terms (LICENSE.md, Section 2). The World Inequality Database extracts are available under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and are redistributed with the written agreement of the WID team (12 October 2026). The Belgian reference budgets are unpublished data from CEBUD (Thomas More University of Applied Sciences), included with its agreement (22 October 2026); they remain CEBUD's data. On the Belgian reference budgets, see Storms, B., Goedemé, T., & Nisen, L. (Eds.). (2025). Wat heeft een gezin minimaal nodig in België? Referentiebudgetten als gids voor een menswaardig inkomen. Politeia; and CEBUD's REMI-REDI website, https://remiredi.be/