Spanish politics needs elements to bring together ideas and analysis, which will make it possible to reach agreements if we all have to move the country forward together. That of territorial financing is one, particularly due to the burden that interested political readings allow on issues that, in their detail, are complex enough to be enervatedly dumped in the debate on territorial disagreement. It is said that the agreement for the current regional disengagement must start from the Constitution. Let's do it then. “Nationalities and regions”, “fast track and slow track communities”, historical territories and common regime: all this fits in the Constitution. Why, then, lock yourself in uniform answers in a Spain that is proving to be more and more plural?
The figures of the latest available liquidation that the ministry has just released are, once again, treated with hostility by those who are interested in waging a political battle. The data on the fiscal capacity shown by the autonomous communities and the transfers they receive from the autonomous financing system leave no room for doubt: the Balearic Islands and Catalonia, in this order, support a good part of the horizontal leveling observed in favor of the alleged inter-territorial solidarity . I leave out Madrid, since as is done with the capital of Berlin, these capital metropolis cities play in another league: not all the fiscal capacity that they exhibit is their own, since it is where certain taxes are settled, nor all the spending needs that they may be in charge of when the community, province and capital city coincide.
Beyond these unappealable figures of the implicit tax drainage in the system, there is the question of the greater or lesser financing that they may have. Curiously, some new interpretations (Fedea 2023) consider those two communities, despite what we have just pointed out, overfinanced communities (!).
All this generates confusion among the people: are these two communities well or badly treated?
Part of the confusion is caused by Fedea's analysis. Her reports are certainly correct for the most part – or so I believe – but she often subjects what the data says to highly debatable alternative interpretations. Thus, in these works the normative taxes are re-estimated (including public prices, rates and ceded taxes!) and tables are re-elaborated in different temporary evolutions.
The reference used is not the population of each community, but the adjusted population, implicit in the financing system itself, according to debatable weights applied to aging and considering variables such as dispersion or area, and not according to factors such as population in fact, immigration ratios, concentrations as factors that make the cost of services or others more expensive. Well, overall, when it is said per capita, an adjusted population p.a. is added, which very few of those who interpret the ratios know where it comes from. And it is clear, these are figures that do not later coincide with those corresponding to the legal population, of the ministry, which generates more confusion among the media.
It is recalculated, they say, "to improve the official figures" and "more accurately reflect the resources that the Autonomous Communities would have for the same fiscal effort, and thus make them more comparable among themselves." All of this is done in nominative terms and not in terms of purchasing power, the resources for communities that have their own language are not considered a specific competence, nor are the competitiveness sub-funds, within the gibberish of the Convergence Fund. The report builds “increased funding ratios” (!) from other extraordinary resources provided by the central government (as if all resources were just venues!).
Along this path, it remains unclear whether, even with the intervention of the FLA (Autonomous Liquidity Fund) and with the debt assumed by the State, its lower interest rate compared to what the autonomous community would have paid, can be considered a "contribution ” of the central administration. After recalculating the numerator (State contributions) and with a modified population ratio, the resulting table actually shows what the author considers they receive over what he believes they should receive.
The same is true of the debt cancellation debate. The opposition to it being done with technical arguments (economists call them typical of "moral abuse"), has to hide the position of those who do not accept that a community may have historically had underfinancing that has led to debt, or who does not consider that, in general, with the crisis, the State has made its fiscal consolidation at the expense of territorial finances; that is to say, of the city councils and of some autonomous communities that have not had the elasticity to lower social spending, precisely during the crisis, managing its consequences on the welfare state.
The message is that from the institutions and organizations -on the contrary, at an academic level that each one does what they believe-, it would be convenient to use the platforms available to converge and not further enervate, with partisan interpretations, the debate on plural Spain .
