The Spanish Constitutional Court has just overturned the cut in personal income tax (IRPF) for the lowest incomes - specifically, 205,043 Catalans who declared incomes equal to or less than 12,450 euros in the 2020 fiscal year. The tax cut, which was agreed between Quim Torra's Catalan government and the Comuns, as one of the conditions imposed by the left-wing group to vote in favour of that year's budget, was later appealed by the Spanish government - of which Podemos and its Catalan allies the Comuns are also part - for invading central government competencies. Those affected, who perhaps do not see on many occasions how choking the effects of dependency on Spain are, will personally feel the pressure this year of a highly centralised vision of the state.
An administration which has proclaimed itself as the 'most progressive government in history', thus, with the appeal it presented, dropped its disguise, and the Constitutional Court only had to deliver the final blow: it is more important to defend a homogeneous Spain by all means possible than to pass a law whose exclusive beneficiaries are the neediest parts of the popular classes. It is astounding that each and every one of the social measures approved by the Catalan government and which the CUP, the Comuns and even the PSC have alternately supported with their votes, have been subjected to the rigorous control of the Spanish government and the steamroller of the Constitutional Court.
This creates a terrible paradox, due to the underfunding of Catalonia through three levers upon which the Spanish government conveniently seizes to stifle the Catalan economy: the chronic fiscal deficit that the state persistently registers with Catalonia, above the sum of 16 billion euros annually; a system of financing for autonomous regions that is particularly harmful to Catalonia and that should have been updated because it expired on 1st January 2014; and Spanish budgets that never recognize the investment that Catalonia is entitled to in function of its GDP and, besides, of the amount budgeted, what is actually executed does not reach the figure of 65%, while Madrid surpasses 100% without any problems.
That is why the ruling of the Constitutional Court overturning the reduction of personal income tax for those in the lowest income categories in Catalonia is of enormous importance. For it to also coincide with the week in which the Catalan economy ministry will bring to its cabinet, this Tuesday, the draft budget of the Generalitat of Catalonia for 2022, for approval, is an opportunity to demonstrate the importance of the public accounts in meeting people's specific needs. A budget that does not yet have the endorsement of the CUP, which has convened its grassroots to discuss the accounts on 12th, 13th and 14th November.
Anything other than an affirmative vote or an abstention by the anti-capitalist party on the Catalan government budget - and so far what they say is that they are closer to a 'no' - would mean a unilateral rupture of the legislature agreement signed by ERC and the CUP. The latter party would thus force the government to look for other partners to take the vote forward, but obviously, by the same rule of three, the commitment signed by president Pere Aragonès to submit himself to a no-confidence motion in the middle of the legislature would also lapse.