Those of us who dedicate ourselves to the study can easily observe trends, more or less underground currents of ideas that flow in one way or another towards politics. Some currents feed previous positions that want to be consolidated, dammed up, while other currents create new positions. In political economy, the springs of the supposed empirical evidence abound and finally dress capitals of political prejudices. In regional financing, these currents are especially fluid. With the data updates they are renewed in a rain that, well furrowed, never has a drought. The fountain fedea, greatly stimulated by its funding, is an example. It contrasts with what in its day was the Institut d’Estudis Autonòmics -today, of Autogovern- and the University of Barcelona, under the direction of Trias Fargas -in Guadiana mode-, of Alexandre Pedrós, and Antoni Castells, later. I note that almost no ideas flow from the Catalan side, and that from the central part flow in abundance, being quite financed. AND this fine rain wins the game today in the analysis for the reform of regional financing, so valued in the past by our Catalan socialist party. It is enough to look at the publications and the working groups to validate my finding.
State management of aquifers and the prevalence of central channels allow the elected to do and undo. Thus, the misconception that Spain is ‘one of the most decentralized countries in the world’ is already imposed today (it will be so in spending, if that is the case, but not in tax autonomy and fiscal responsibility), from a Constitution internationally recognized as unitary rather than ‘federal’, in the absence of shared sovereignty, and with a financing system based on a patron father who estimates the tax needs of his dependents and transfers with discretion (system unanimously recognized as a great ‘Frankenstein’). All this, in absence of protection mechanisms in the face of various institutional disloyalties: neither the Senate, nor the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council, nor the protection of the Constitutional Court.
Wasteland
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After the regrets, it should be recognized that the power of some is also the abandonment of others. The exhaustion of being here and there – and the realization that everything ‘was going to the sea’ – has left the Catalan contribution dry. And they run now, without an answer, the false topics. For example – and here I could make appointments for all tastes – the assumption that tax harmonization is the value of equityand the demand for more fiscal responsibility expresses selfishness. This obviates the value of taking risks on one’s destiny in costs and benefits, and that we can all end up being, through equalization, just as poor and stupid. Also the fact of assuming the premise that always more public spending means more redistribution, for ‘solidarity’ – that’s right! – regardless of who, what and how it is spent. Or enthrone regional leveling transfers for income convergence and neglect regional policy, in the well-known context that internal regional inequalities are nine times more important than external ones.
Outside of this prevailing vision cluster, here, the field of study of regional financing is vacant. Partly because they had not tilled or fertilized and abandoned their cultivation. Also due to overexploitation: they had wanted to feed the entire State with fruits, ideas, but it has left them to rot. Today we live in a not very fertile context in which the supposed arguments of efficiency (‘without differences’ is equated to ‘without distortions’) prevail over those of ‘respect for minorities’ (as if they were not important for social cohesion). . As a result, it seems that it is governments, out of their interest, and not the feelings of the people, that demand respect for culture, self-government or the right to decide. From the bad press of politics -of all other governments, except his own- the democratic principle is disqualified: the preferences of the people are what governments make, and not the other way around. And it is ignored that by subjugating one government to another one sacrifices, for the majority of the other, the majority of those who feel different. The surveys indicate this: the self-government capacity to which citizens aspire, the yearning for the provincial councils in front of the autonomous capitals, or the observational studies of behavior (what is read, what media is listened to, what leisure is valued). , in addition to the direction of the vote in a repeated succession of pro-sovereignty majorities, which continues to be present. In this sense, the non-recognition of diversity in regional financing is, possibly, already today the least of the symptoms of what I am exposing, but the entrenchment in which we live would have to occupy who says they care about social cohesion .