Word: rico
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...tools devised and marshaled for the jobs were 1) tax exemption, 2) unabashed encouragement toward high profits even when based, as at first, on low wages, 3) patient coddling of the fearful and uninformed investor with every kind of assistance. U.S. Federal income taxes do not apply in Puerto Rico, and any new business not provably running away from U.S. taxes or unions was freed from the island income tax for ten years. Profits could and did run to 60% of sales; Fomento Chief Moscoso says: "We found this not too high a price to pay for our accelerated rate...
...come. Ted Moscoso can often be seen in Fomento's plush offices in the new Tishman Building on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, striding down a corridor on his way for some "belly-to-belly selling" of a businessman interested in setting up a manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico. "We have learned," he says, "that the U.S. businessmen we deal with today are as different from the plantation and sugar-mill colonials as we ourselves are from malaria-ridden serfs...
...then equal to that of the U.S. now. The U.S. recession is hurting the island, and with unionization and rising wages, the tax-exemption law, which expires at the end of 1963, is left as the main incentive. But in a single week recently, U.S. investors were in Puerto Rico to study prospects in plastic webbing, dresses, sportswear, tourist hotels, motorboat trailers, wall tiles, plastic toys, scientific apparatus, shoe machinery and cookies...
Moscoso retorts. Puerto Rico buys heavily beyond its own shores (mostly from the U.S.) and its purchases of goods and services top $800 million a year. It sells less, and its 1957 balance-of-payments deficit was $265 million. The deficit was redressed mostly by incoming capital, payments of $62.5 million to Puerto Rican veterans (who suffered heavy casualties in the Korean war), and money sent home by Puerto Ricans working in the U.S. Washington's grants-in-aid for such programs as health, housing and highways totaled $41 million (which is a bit more than islanders...
...against 38% in 1940. The Planning Board had written a paper on the economic consequences of independence, of being shut out of U.S. tariff walls. A Tariff Commission economist came down here, and I had two or three long talks with him. I said: 'Of course Puerto Rico cannot be independent in the same way as the Philippines, which have greater resources and lower population density, but let's see if it's possible to work something out.' He said: 'Suppose the U.S. gave Puerto Rico freedom and also free trade with the U.S.; other...