80,000 of the wing
All countries with a degree of culture establish a system of grants for their writers. If we believe in culture, language, and literature, it is considered beneficial to have public funds subsidizing literary creation—a form of patronage that aims to promote excellence, creativity, and art forms that the market may not be able to sustain on its own.
In the Balearic Islands, the IEB (Institute of Balearic Studies) and the ILC (Institute of Catalan Literature) in Catalonia offer grants for writers, as does the Barcelona City Council. They aren't exactly generous; even the highest grants don't reach the annual minimum wage. However, these grants allow writers to "buy time," or to stop working other jobs to dedicate themselves to writing a specific book, something that has earned the trust of a jury of experts. For every grant awarded, of course, there are often dozens of applicants who weren't selected, always following a regulated, and inevitably subjective, procedure.
If money is given to film, energy industries, large media groups, scientific research, etc., then it should also be given to the arts, as no one should doubt. But I want to reiterate that, in the case of writers, public funding for writing in our country currently amounts to a maximum of €10,000, although years ago it might have been higher, but not by much. Grants offered by certain private companies—such as banks or pharmaceutical companies—to support writers are another matter; these can be more substantial, but in no case in Spain do they ever reach the amount that the Barcelona City Council now wants to give to a South American writer who wants to come to the Catalan capital to write: €80. Let's reiterate: there is no comparable support for creative work in Catalan, considered individually. And all this isn't magic: it's your taxes.
Catalan taxpayers, regardless of the language they speak, will see their money go towards promoting literary creation in a language that, surprise, surprise, doesn't need it, because it has millions of speakers and even million-euro grants for writing, in addition to a larger market and a multinational state system that makes everything fly. And, what's more, now there will be a Catalan municipal grant!
In the US, there are MacArthur Fellowships that can award over half a million dollars to a single writer (for five years): why not give them our public money too? American literature is more vigorous and innovative than South American literature, but alas, Americans promote writing in English, just as South American countries do with "their" Spanish language, which they defend so fiercely that they often don't even want to learn Catalan when they come to live in the Catalan Countries. Some people have a plan to screw us over and make us disappear with our own taxes.