Jorge Luis Borges

Here’s a story you can file under “not in a million years in the USA.”

Rory Carroll wrote in the Guardian yesterday that the lower house of Argentina’s parliament will consider a proposal to grant pensions of up to $940/month to writers. The idea behind this special pension is that writers provide a “social richness” to their country that’s difficult to compensate for adequately. Thus, writers could soon be joining a class of workers that includes firefighters, police officers, and other government workers.

To qualify for the pension under the proposed law, a writer has to have been writing for more than 20 years–or have spent 20 years devoted to “literary creation” as the bill puts it–and have published at lease five books. These books have to be published through a bona fide publisher and have been issued an ISBN number.

Speaking about the justification for proposal to the BBC, Carlos Heller, one of the sponsors, said that, ”Writers support the general culture of a community. They are individual creators who generate a sort of social richness that is difficult to quantify.”

As the writer and university professor Mario Goloboff put it, this would correct a situation that leaves many writers destitute when they reach old age. ”The state grants prestige to intellectuals but that isn’t payment,” he said.  ”They deserve a pension.”

If the national government passes the law it will be using similar programs in place in France and Spain as a template. It’s also catching up with its own cities as pensions for writers already exist in Buenos Aires–though at $660/month it’s not as generous as the national proposal.

A few members of congress were particularly elated at the prospect of this proposal:

Jorge Boccanera, one of the dozens of published writers in congress, welcomed the proposed legislation, telling the newspaper Clarin it would boost “imagination and the comprehension of the world”. Vicente Battista, another author and member of congress, was even more lyrical, saying congress had a piece of “utopia” in its hands.