IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID!

The fa­mous phrase from James Carville to George H W Bush in 1992 could apply to the needs of Cat­alo­nia today.

Cat­alo­nia is con­sid­ered a rel­a­tively rich com­mu­nity. At the same time, it is es­ti­mated that around €20 bil­lion in taxes leave Cat­alo­nia for Madrid every year that are never rein­vested in the com­mu­nity. This adds to other im­por­tant sources of rev­enue such as Barcelona’s air­port and port, owned and run by the Span­ish cen­tral ad­min­is­tra­tion, and whose sur­pluses are mainly not used to im­prove these key in­fra­struc­tures, but to fi­nance those in deficit in other parts of Spain.

I won’t dwell on how bla­tantly the Span­ish ad­min­is­tra­tion wastes these and the other re­sources it col­lects. But just to men­tion a few in­di­ca­tors: the in­ef­fi­cient use of re­sources in­cludes crony cap­i­tal­ism that favours friends and re­volv­ing doors be­tween large firms and un­qual­i­fied politi­cians, spend­ing on air­ports or high-speed trains with­out pas­sen­gers, an in­ef­fi­cient and his­tor­i­cally high level of spend­ing on the mil­i­tary, or un­con­trolled fund­ing of a cor­rupt monar­chy, among many oth­ers.

I will focus in­stead on the sit­u­a­tion for Cat­alo­nia’s cit­i­zens. With an av­er­age salary of €24,040 a year, youth un­em­ploy­ment of 24% (it is 17% and 21% in France and Por­tu­gal), and an av­er­age price of hous­ing of €7,159 per m2 in Barcelona, it’s no won­der that Cata­lan youth are among the last in Eu­rope to leave the parental home, while the birthrate is 1.2 chil­dren per woman, among the low­est in Eu­rope. Mean­while, so­cial as­sis­tance is scarce to say the least. I know a teacher with three chil­dren, which he sup­ports mostly by him­self, that has been de­nied the “large fam­ily cat­e­gory” on bu­reau­cratic grounds and re­ceives no sub­si­dies at all. This is the sit­u­a­tion of many fam­i­lies that make ends meet through aus­ter­ity and fam­ily sol­i­dar­ity.

Cat­alo­nia has ur­gen­cies that per­tain to any na­tion but with­out the re­sources to cover them. For ex­am­ple, the need to pro­tect and fos­ter the use of its lan­guage, Cata­lan, which stud­ies say suf­fers a mid-term dan­ger of dis­ap­pear­ing. This brings a need to take firm mea­sures, such as sup­port­ing the local pro­duc­tion of cul­tural prod­ucts like films, the­atre or, at least, dub­bing or sub­ti­tling for­eign movies into Cata­lan. Yet these mea­sures re­quire funds not avail­able to the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment. Along the same lines, Cat­alo­nia has a great pub­lic health sys­tem. Yet it runs thin on med­ical staff, so that wait­ing times for first-visit ap­point­ments is often more than a month, and stress has been re­ported among med­ical staff dur­ing the pan­demic. Other re­source-con­sum­ing con­cerns re­gard en­vi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion and gen­der equal­ity.

All these is­sues are often men­tioned by Cata­lan politi­cians, par­tic­u­larly when elec­tions are around the cor­ner. They are nonethe­less well aware that solv­ing these prob­lems re­quires a level of fund­ing and de­ci­sion-mak­ing power that is im­pos­si­ble under the fis­cal plun­der­ing of the Span­ish ad­min­is­tra­tion. So, to con­sis­tently pur­sue these goals, first it would be re­quired to be free of these bind­ings and achieve the eco­nomic and po­lit­i­cal power per­tain­ing to an in­de­pen­dent state. Oth­er­wise, the de­c­la­ra­tions re­gard­ing such ob­jec­tives, with­out a plan for in­de­pen­dence, sound like mar­ket­ing cam­paigns to at­tract votes, and not se­ri­ous aims to achieve dur­ing a gov­ern­men­tal man­date.

In con­clu­sion, a mes­sage to the Cata­lan politi­cians that are full of talk about so­cial and en­vi­ron­men­tal poli­cies would be very much in line with that of Carville: It’s the econ­omy (and there­fore in­de­pen­dence) stu­pid!