Word: statehooders
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Then there is the issue of Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, which permits U.S. companies to shelter the profits of their Puerto Rican subsidiaries. Now worth about $3.4 billion a year, this huge tax break was intended to create industry and jobs. To the statehooders, both the commonwealth and its chief economic prop, Section 936, are obsolete because they no longer produce much economic growth. Rossello argues that Puerto Rico can go forward only with "full participation, with all the rights, all the privileges but also all the responsibilities" of statehood. While he makes the transition sound easy...
...progress has stalled. Industrial development has failed so far to move the island's per capita income close to mainland levels. Unemployment is now 18%, and half the people get some form of public assistance. This year Congress voted to reduce the 936 tax benefit starting in 1994. Statehood would accelerate 936's demise. "It would be a disaster," says Alex Maldonado, a former newspaper editor who is writing an economic history of the island. "The statehooders have no alternative economic model...
That prediction assumes the wholesale flight of American companies if they must pay full corporate taxes. False alarm, the statehooders reply; the U.S. is expanding trade with Latin America, and Puerto Rico is a natural gateway. While affluent Puerto Ricans would have to pay federal income tax for the first time, the working poor and the unemployed would get higher benefits as welfare payments rose to meet mainland levels. Rossello promises that for every new dollar going to Washington, three would return in the form of higher assistance. Senator Ruben Berrios, head of the Independence Party, quips...
...would accept a deal as long as I knew that in the end I would have an independent entity." Nusseibeh believes that this will happen, that the Israeli government is moving toward accepting some kind of Palestinian state. A key Israeli official said last week, "Actually, the road to statehood is open to the Palestinians. It is long, but it is open." A Labor Party official seemed to confirm that privately. The long-standing Labor policy called for returning much of the West Bank but retaining a broad security zone along the western bank of the Jordan River, where there...
...language issue is linked by some Puerto Ricans to the campaign to make the island America's 51st state. Rossello is pro-statehood, and so is a majority of the legislature. Carlos Romero-Barcelo, Puerto Rico's resident commissioner in the U.S. House of Representatives, has only limited voting rights in that body, and he calls the new law a step toward full representation. Says Romero: "We in Puerto Rico want to be viewed as citizens...