Bring in Chinese?
How are you going to get millions of Chinese o move there?
Quit speaking Spanish.
Will never happen. The left has turned “hispanics” into a solid voting and contributing block. The left will never allow PR to become a free market island where hard work is rewarded and indolence is punished.
“The U.S. government has a moral, if not legal, obligation to help”.
The US government has neither.
L
If the author's solution is to strip PR of it's autonomy and do the same, while stripping Puerto Ricans of their citizenship and forbidding them to emigrate to the US, I'd say he has a plan. Politically impossible, but nevertheless interesting.
The real solution is to pay nothing, give the island independence and remove citizenship from free-loading Puerto Ricans.
Let them go to the IMF or re-negotiate a loan package like Argentina.
It’s called “Marxism”.
People like me warned the people of Puerto Rico not to implement it.
And we were laughed at, mocked, made fun of, given the finger and called “racists”.
So now that it’s turning out the way we said it would, the Puerto Ricans are pissed off and demanding that we bail them out.
And our leaders will, because we elected Marxists.
So it’s Monday in Obamaland....
If only they could vote, obammy would write them a check. Heck, he’ll write the check anyway if only to waste tax dollars.
Whether its true or not, some people have felt that NAFTA hurt Puerto Rico by giving Mexico an advantage, which combined with Mexico’s geographical advantage removed much of the reason a company would locate in PR.
I noticed at the time I was there that most of the refineries had shut down, simply because shipping finished products to the mainland had become uneconomical. And, in fact, at the time they were bringing in finished gasoline from Venezuela, which competed with gasoline refined on the island. It was like a one-two punch that left a lot of people out of work.
I liked PR quite a lot. I probably saw it with different eyes; I had worked in various parts of Latin America and wasn’t expecting Cincinnati. I found basically what I like about latin America without most of the disadvantages. And I generally like people, I speak Spanish, so that makes a difference I suppose.
I believed that in a Tenth Amendment country, all states would have the kind of autonomy that Puerto Rico ought to have. PR has an odd mix of autonomy and dictatorship from Washington. I wasn’t really there long enough to make any real generalizations, though. I used to check the real estate websites all the time, though, thinking about making it my home base.
You know, a lot of people and companies are relocating outside the US for two reasons. One is to get clear of the Leviathan, all the heavy restrictions imposed by Washington. The other is because they can; the cost of shipping has dropped, and the cost of the transfer of information has dropped to almost nothing. People (and companies) are able to work remotely and do it all the time. How many companies are off-shoring their work to India and the Philippines, for example, thanks to the magic of broadband. A lot of people are moving to Central America, Panama, and points further south simply because its not nearly so remote as it once was, but its outside the US.
Puerto Rico has the advantage that it is US, and not US. They need to refine their relationship with the US to capitalize on the desire people have to “eat their cake and have it too”.
A key piece of this is, of course, personal security and economic freedom. That is one thing Singapore and Hong Kong offer that Mexico cannot offer, for example, which is personal security for your execs, that you don’t have to worry about street crime or kidnappings. PR already is free of federal income tax, but Island tax is almost as high. And people do worry about crime, though I honestly didn’t see much (again, compared to Latin America, I don’t think PR is that bad). I personally felt perfectly safe.
I shouldn’t be opining about something I know so little about, but I like the place and on FR, not knowing about something never stops me from having an opinion. :)
Puerto Rico: 84.