We want freedom...with subsidies. Sounds quite American.
Spain isn’t threatening to cut it off. They’re threatening to leave. They actually receive more money from the central givernment than any region in Spain right now, but they think they’ll get more by threatening.
On the other hand, maybe they’ll be dumb enough to try to be independent. For a while. Barcelona has a much higher Muslim population than anywhere else in Spain, and the Catalans have bent over backwards to build mosques for them. So maybe Catalonia will soon be Muslim.