I think Mississippi would retain its title of “fattest state.”
Not to start a debate outside the statehood topic, but why does PR get funds for things like the interstate highway system when its citizens don’t pay federal income taxes?
“In 2009, Puerto Rico paid $3.742 billion into the US Treasury.” Their non-income taxes go back. And I figure out if any portion of their income tax goes back to the states, but it might?
Most interstate funding comes from fuel taxes, which PR pays.
Federal Employees in PR and those who make income outside of Puerto Rico are required to pay Federal Income taxes.
Also, I believe that the residents do pay all other Federal taxes along with Commonwealth taxes.
Well…
First the easy ones:
Flag: The appropriate office in DC has already designed the putative flag for 51 states. It’s six rows alternating 9 and 8 stars.
**
Current federal taxes**: Local income tax depends on the source of income; if your personal income is entirely from PR sources or your business is incorporated in PR and only has income from PR-based activities, you are only subject to the PR tax system. Otherwise there are some federal taxes applied. PR income tax brackets kick in earlier than the US federal brackets but average incomes are lower. But yeah, many federal taxes do apply here. One of the interesting but seldom explored issues is whether the full equalization of funding and transfers upon statehood would allow the local government to cut their own taxes so the net burden is not that much greater.
US Politicians making weird statements when running in a primary in Puerto Rico: Mr. Santorum went further and actually showed up and said that to our faces in the primary campaign. Of course, he did that because he knew Romney was winning the PR primary in a runaway (80%+) so he wanted to pander to his trogloservative base by saying “see, I went and told them to their face!”
Ok, now deeper:
**First let’s be clear: Like every vote on the issue since 1952, this is a LOCAL initiative that has NO binding effect on Congress, save as a point of information about how the people of Puerto Rico may feel. ** There has never been a Congresionally sponsored status vote in PR since 1951’s “This new constitutional arrangement that at the time of this vote does not yet even have a name: Take it or Take it”
Exactly, that was one of the various options in the White House report, that later was put into the House bill that died in the Senate of 41-Vote Disease (as have all PR status bills for the last 23 years). The administration here decided to lump it together.
This is one of those issues where politics distorts policy, since the parties in PR are aligned per status proposal, it is intrinsecally linked with gaining support at the same time to get elected into office. Consensus is near impossible because you want to be able to use it as a wedge issue to run against the other guys.
The current administration and legislature are Pro-Statehood and if they really wanted to play to their base they’d join the minority pro-independence parties in a referendum to read:* Commonwealth: Sucks or Blows?* But the government knows that realistically such a question would be dismissed by Congress.
Everyone who’s got some real power about it tells us that status resolution needs to be driven by a consensus or a “clear majority” (President’s words, left weaselfully unclarified of course) voting FOR something and* then* we can sit down to negotiate terms. However the local culture is averse to any proposal for change that does not FIRST tell us what to not even bother asking for and offer us terms and conditions and guarantees for what IS on the table, or else it’s viewed as too great a risk of losing the little we already have. This attitude is shared by a large part of the pro-Statehood party specially WRT the language and taxes issues.
On top of it, a large minority in the pro-Statehood party had been rather ticked off at their own administration for having the audacity of trying to actually govern the place (including such Republican-leaning policies as firing 17,000 public employees and cuting 3 billion in expenditures over 4 years) rather than just dedicating themselves to proclaiming statehood.
The administration here was in a quandary: If they did not put forth a status referendum with statehood on the ballot right the very first vote, they were in hot water with their base. OTOH, if they simply excluded the statu quo right off the bat, Congress would not see it as a fair vote (the pro-Commonwealth forces very effectively lobbied DC that you could not simply exclude the current status).
The statu-quo forces are themselves divided in what I’ll call Unionist and Sovereignist Commonwealthers. They believe the Commonwealth should just be allowed to evolve with the times to reach some sort of optimized equilibrium of autonomy and subsidy/protection. Unionist Commonwealthers believe this can be best achieved within the current structure of autonomous territory. Sovereignist Commonwealthers believe that Congress will never go for that and that only the Associated Nation model can really achieve it, but they are divided as to whether it is something to which the current status should just evolve, or should it be a clean break.
HOWEVER: besides those factions among the ideological believers, many of the actual, counted*** voters*** for the pro-Commonwealth ballot are in fact themselves statehooders or independentists who just feel it’s not the right time for the move to be made, so they consistently vote for the statu quo as a safe placeholder until some day when the stars align right (**)
(** Largely a reflection of the view “that PR is a welfare-dependent economic basket case”. The damage is mostly self-inflicted, really: during the whole of the Cold War the US and local governments kept throwing money at us in both entitlements and tax-haven economic incentive subsidies, in order to keep us peaceful and immune to revolutionary contamination, and we grew too content with that.)
So the decision was made to jam everything together and have both questions on status in the ballot, simultaneously with the general election, so that the pro-statehood/pro-commonwealth voters were to be forced like Peter to reaffirm three times on what side they were. Although pro-commonwealthers do argue that this is weighed in favor of statehood, really it’s more* to remove legitimacy from the statu-quo and make it so the argument from here on out is over what’s to replace it sooner than later().
Say you get the first question gets 60% for change, 40% for staying put. Then the second question gets 51% statehood, 39% Associated Nation, 10% independence.
If under ideal conditions only the 60% who wanted change actually voted on Q2, than that would mean a true vote of 31% for statehood, 23% for Association, 6% for independence, 40% keep statu quo. But, since nothing prevents you from voting against change on the first and still for your preference on the second, what you WILL see are numbers that in Q2 add up to more people preferring a change than those who said the same thing in Q1, further eroding the statu-quo.
(* The internal political argument is that when/if standing pat is ever officially eliminated as an option, the masses will overwhelmingly turn for statehood. Not an unreasonable assumption. On the pro-independence side the position is that once standing pat is officially eliminated, the Congress will resoundingly defeat any real call for statehood or impose politically toxic terms, and after two or three such rejections everyone will see the light – or the Congress will have had enough and show us the door. A bit more far fetched)
Hard to get anything out of this vote that Congress will view as a real mandate for fast-tracking statehood, but it will be suggestive that we are not happy to stay as things are forever. The idea being to at least be able to show up in DC and say, look, you keep asking us to make up our minds, and we don’t like what we have, but WHAT ***is ***on the table?
…To which they still will be able to answer, NO, YOU first reach a consensus of what you really want, and we’ll tell you if and on what terms we’ll give it to you. Rinse. Repeat.
Safe money is on that in the 2020 election we’ll be right where we are right now.
You may not have heard this, but the economy is down and EVERYONE is cutting public sector jobs and reducing spending, Dem and Pub alike so I don’t think your partisan jab is fitting unless you want to also bring up the Democrat-leaning policies in Colorado that have killed off the public sector jobs and spending here too.
The reference was to that Gov. Fortuño is a Republican and those who voted for him*** knew it***, and the jab, fellow Doper, was *at the NPP members *who have reacted badly with his putting in exactly the of policies one would have expected, that were necessary to stop the hemorrhaging and preserve the public credit for a few more years. That faction would have preferred him to let everything crash around him while doing nothing but push statehood, and they now resent him and say “the administration’s more concerned with looking like good Republicans stateside than being good Statehooders islandside”, a totally unjust accusation but one that factors in the scheduling of the statehood vote simultaneous with the election, as they want to prove that the one does not exclude the other.
But why in this economy is cutting jobs and expendenture a “Republican-leaning policy” when everyone is doing it? What does it add to you statement when you could have easily said
"On top of it, a large minority in the pro-Statehood party had been rather ticked off at their own administration for having the audacity of trying to actually govern the place (including firing 17,000 public employees and cuting 3 billion in expenditures over 4 years) rather than just dedicating themselves to proclaiming statehood. "
and left political parties out of it?
Nothing at all. But since he IS being atacked explicitly for trying to act “more Republican than pro-Statehood”, however much it may be an unfair attack, and the administration’s reaction to that influences the scheduling of the ballot question, I mentioned it just as we’d casually mention it around here (PR, not the Dope). My apologies for not having felt it was necessary of me to do a more thorough job of “neutralizing” it for stateside-US consumption.
But since I did mention US parties, might as well bring up that federal-level parties do have an influence. Until the 1970s the old-school GOP was a patron to the local pro-statehood movement but alas by the time it began looking like it was actually gaining some traction it was just as the hard right wing took over the GOP and pulled back from the assumed endorsement; to do justice, the recent GOP* Presidents* had been much more sympathetic than the Congress (Bush I overtly advocated Statehood while in office) as part of the effort to draw the Hispanic vote. The (Roosevelt-Kennedy eras) Dems spent the 30s through 70s pandering to their own set of local clients in the pro-territory side with great largesse, until Carter and later Clinton turned around and opened up to the pro-statehooders as well (their cash contributions are as green as anyone else’s).
For over a generation now neither of the two stateside parties has had a true local client as they seek to cater to the US Hispanic vote by seeming to “play fair” with PR and having ties with factions in both major movements – though Obama is considered to be much friendlier to the pro-Commonwealthers, IMO because the Libs suspect the possibility of a Latino State could be used by the Cons as a wedge issue, plus Chicago Latino politicos like Congressman Gutierrez are strongly anti-statehood. A lot of effort was expended by ® statehooders during this last campaign to pitch to the GOP primary field that we actually are a social-conservative community who would not be guaranteed blue and that the GOP candidate should support statehood, and the only real takers were Romney and Perry and the latter self-destructed before it could become an issue.
So as things stand, the Powers That Be in DC look at our “leaders” and see a number of factions who’ll line up with whoever will even pay minimal lip service, and IMO that creates a lack of political respect in the circles of metropolitan power that hinders even further any real attention to the issue.
So let me ask you JR, If PR does decide on statehood will it be blue, red, purple or a tossup every election?
Off the top of my head I’d say bluish purple at least for a while, as IMO it would take a few cycles for the followers of our local parties to start realy thinking in terms of lib/con, D/R as opposed to NPP/PDP, Statehood/Commonwealth and toss off the old local-party loyalties (“What do you mean we’re gonna vote for THAT dude because he’s the Democrat? You spent the last 16 years telling us he was a no-good goat-felching NPP asshat!” … “But, but, what do you mean we gotta vote her out because she’s a Birther wingnut? She supported statehood all these years, shouldn’t we reward her?”).
If the GOP sticks to a hard right on things such as language-identity politics (English-Only, etc) then we’ll quickly go solid blue or else be the place where the “liberal Republican” is reborn. If the Dems go too hard left on some of the “moral” values issues, that will redden the purple.
If all the current nominal Rs and Ds in the two major parties today lined up as such, then I’d call for an initial D plurality with a considerable Independent group, with a chance for close elections depending on who’s running, due to a large proportion of traditional-values voters. The R’s would benefit from a strong bench of already-established pro-statehood leaders ready to take their victory laps. I would not be surprised to have our initial Senate delegation be 1R, 1D. Some major cities would be either solid D or R so I could see our House group being a 3D:2R split (until things get properly gerrymandered). Split government (Governor and one or both Houses from different parties) at the state level would be a possibility, has happened under the curent system.
In a presidential campaign, depending on who are the candidates we would be* at least* “leaning D” as default starting position for the first few cycles, with tendency towards “strongly D”,*** unless ***the GOP candidate is someone who creates buzz and pours some SuperPAC sugar on us. That candidate could make it a race.
– JRD, back tomorrow
I’d like to thank JR for this post, as it’s far and away the most enlightening thing I’ve read on the topic. Various news reports and Wikipedia have given this very short shrift indeed, which is unfortunate given the seemingly byzantine nature of the process.
Does that mean there’s no formal “outcome”, as such? Or are the results – or, some possible results, at least! – seemed to be an actual request from the PRn people to the US legislature?
In terms of the statistics of the vote, or as a matter of psychology?
And is such a vote defined to be a vote for statehood? Or is it purely a matter of telling the US Congress, “there are the results, try to make some sense out of them”?
Does that mean that the “correct” vote, for someone who definitely wants the status quo, but who might still have some slight preference between the three alternatives, is (having noted no change on part 1, obviously) to not vote in part 2 at all?
I think I might go see if Paddy Power is offering odds on that!
+1
So JR, any updates from our future 51st state?