The Real Problem With Puerto Rico

We might as well just face it.  The United States of America is a lousy Colonial power. 

We just don’t know how to do it right. Heck, we don’t really know how to do it at all.

Wait, you say. We are not a colonial power at all. Never were. We rebelled against the King of England and became a free nation, denouncing colonial control and becoming the world’s first real democracy. Just read the history books.

Well, not quite. I’ll give you a little quiz to show you what I mean. What do the following places have in common - Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Wake Island, Midway Atoll. And, for good measure, add Washington, D.C.

You guessed it. They are all colonies of the United States, although we use nicer words to describe them. Territories is the most common one. Footnotes might be more accurate. Here’s why.

Anyone living in Puerto Rico is a United States citizen. So is anyone living in Washington, D.C. And, if they lived somewhere else, they would have the right - as all citizens do - to elect their own national government and their elected representatives would decide on their own budgets and taxes.

But Puerto Ricans can only vote for President if they move to another state. And they do have an elected observer in Congress who can sit on committees, but can not vote. Pretty much the same thing for the folks in Washington. Funny that both places have enormous financial problems, and that it is our Congress which really has the biggest role in setting their budgets.

And, hey, do you know who the top official is in Puerto Rico? Not the governor, actually. The person with the most power is the President of the United States. Not that the President actually uses that power much. Too much work, very few details, poor options all around and - in the end - not a single vote in the next federal election.

So, when our President and Congress get around to doing things, the problems of Virginia and Utah and Oklahoma and New Jersey and all the other states seem to come first, and the colonies end up at the back of the line. Works that way for Republicans and Democrats alike. Like I said, footnotes.

There are 16 possessions outside the United States under our nation’s control - the simple word colony will save a lot of space - although it paints a false picture, since seven of them are uninhabited and five are just two square miles or less in size. Ah, but those tiny specks of land give us control of vast stretches of ocean for fishing and other things. We even turned the uninhabited MIdway Atoll into a National Wildlife Refuge.

Now, we got these colonial possessions in different ways. We got American Samoa under the Treaty of Berlin in  1899.  Captain William Reynolds sailed into Midway on the USS Lackawanna and took possession in 1867. The Treaty of Paris gave the United States Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico on 1899, after we won the Spanish-American war. We got the U.S. Virgin Islands the more honorable way, we bought them from Denmark in 1917.

Traditionally, great nations acquire colonies because those far away places have something that the nation wants...things like coal and rubber and diamonds and cheap labor come to mind. Or, they may simply be geographically important, or - in a few cases - they are a convenient place to dump things those nations don’t want. The penal colony on Devil’s Island is a fine example of that.

Now, sooner or later, colonies will rise up and create problems for the nations that own them. After all, who wants to live in a colony where your work hard, see a lot of your money going overseas to an absentee owner, pay more than anyone else for a lot of your basic necessities, pay for soldiers who are there to “protect” you from other would-be owners of your colony, and have someone else make all the important rules governing your community.

When those problems get big enough, there is revolution. There is anger. It becomes more expensive for the owning nation to keep the colony than to set it free, and so the colony is set free. The people can govern themselves

Well, we fought that kind of tyranny during the American revolution.  We won, after great sacrifice of lives and treasure.  It was the beginning of a noble experiment. Which brings us, inevitably, to Puerto Rico - our biggest colony.

By now, you might be pretty mad. Puerto Rico - at least for people whose closest experience to that island is staying at a Hilton on vacation a couple of times or just watching West Side Story - has a pretty bad image. The people are lazy, the country is bankrupt, and there is little gratitude for the prompt response we made after the hurricane hit and all the billions of dollars we have spent in aid.

It’s the same kind of attitude that the English had, the French had, the Germans had, the Dutch had. And, probably, every colonial power going back to the Egyptians and the Romans and the Greeks. But, that’s ancient history. Let’s look at today.

Today, Puerto Rico is bankrupt. Which is to be expected. Things haven’t been good there since all the industry left.

What industry, you ask. Well, all those factories which were built after our Congress gave them a gift - a decade or so of not having to pay taxes on any money they earned in Puerto Rico. Of course, someone had to provide the infrastructure - the roads and the water and the electric power - but those things came courtesy of the local government which created several government monopolies to run them, got unlimited power to sell bonds to build infrastructure, and then had to figure out how to pay those bonds off. Guess how? More government bonds.

Well, things worked out reasonably well until the rug was pulled out. The wonderful tax exemption went away, other countries with cheaper labor offered their own incentives, and the businesses left. So, there was poor Puerto Rico, with nothing but empty factories and mountains of debt.

Which they might have started to pay off if they had an income tax. A really big one, like a thousand percent. Wait, you can’t have a tax that big. And, if everything you buy - from cars to milk to toilet paper - costs more than it does on the mainland United States because you are paying extra import taxes and transportation costs just to get the stuff across what our President calls a “big ocean,” then you sink deeper and deeper into debt. And you quibble with each other over who should be solving things, and you don’t maintain the roads and the electric grid. Just like us, in the mainland United States, with all our aging bridges and electric grids. inadequately maintained.

And, then, the hurricane hits. Just like here.

Well, as I said, our poor non-voting colony isn’t at the top of the list to get help. We just don’t know how much money there will be until we get this tax cut thing figured out. But, here’s one thing we do know -  half the people on Puerto Rico will never know I wrote this. 

They have been without electric power for two months, and electricity isn’t expected to be fully restored until around Christmas. Imagine the outcry if half of Queens or half of Kansas City were to be without power for four months.

Well, Congress has approved $3.5 billion in emergency aid to Puerto Rico, and the island nation is asking for 94 billion more.

We’ll worry about that later. Sometime after the newest sex scandal is thoroughly examined. After all, isn’t that the job - and now the economic necessity - of today’s journalism? Give the audience what it wants. Otherwise, they will just change the channel.

An Unexpected Joy, or I Discover Lazy!

Another week, another delay in my blogging. Hooray!

I say this, happily, because I can. It is one of the great joys of retirement - you can actually not write something, miss your self-imposed deadline, and nothing bad will happen to you. Hooray, again.

So, why am I late? To put it on record, I wanted to blog about the problems of Puerto Rico. That’s because those problems are big, cruel and are being made a lot worse by a failed response from Congress and the President. So, I started to write, explaining my views and my reasons, and I realized I wasn’t doing a very good job. So, I re-wrote, and re-wrote again. Still doing it. The blog keeps changing under my fingers, so to speak. And, other things keep getting in the way. Other subjects to blog about, family events of great importance, and the upcoming FATDOG convention.

To put the most important things first, my son and his wife are having a baby. Due date is around Thanksgiving. Lot of baby-sitting in involved here, which is another great joy and another source of exhaustion.

And we are making Thanksgiving Dinner for an extended family, so there is a lot of shopping and a lot of prep. My wife, Renie, belongs to a choral group - actually two of them - and she has a lot of back-and-forth trips to rehearsals. And shopping for the holidays. And wrapping packages for the holidays.

You can see how the blog keeps getting pushed back.

Then there are the ongoing sex scandals in Washington, the horrid lurching of the proposed Republican tax cut plan, and the ever-growing question of just how long large chunks of the country can keep denying reality when all they watch is Fox news.

And, even that is changing. I was going to a game the other night and listening to one of the loudest conservative radio talk show hosts - yes, I do listen to them once in a while - and he was as critical and nasty as ever. and went into a long discussion of our Constitution and the goals of our founding fathers in denouncing the centralization of power in the United States.

Only difference was that instead of saying “Democrats” when he was condemning the power grab, he said “Republicans.”  Same attack, different party. A possible sign the erosion has begun.

Now, a few words about the Republican tax cut plan. Lots of smart people have said a lot of words, certainly better than me, about how it would hollow out the middle class, certainly anyone who lives in a big city or a heavily populated state.

I said a while back that a lot of voters just turn off listening to people who complain about changes being made by the Republicans in Congress until it actually effects them. The tax plan is terrible becomes “blah, blah, blah” to them until they have to fill out their taxes.

So, here’s a simple example of why I think it’s so horrible. Let’s pretend, for just a  moment, that it becomes law, and all us people living in blue, high -tax states like New York or California can no longer deduct taxes.

Well, first thing to happen is that the state legislatures will probably cut back sharply on state aid to public schools. Let the local school boards raise their taxes.

Then the really expensive work of maintaining our roads and bridges, tunnels and mass transit lines, will be put off for a while. And fares will go up. It gets really expensive to have five or six or seven million people trying to live and work in a small area. Maybe the commuter lines will just run two or three rush-hour trains a day, and the commute to work will go up to two or three hours a day. Each way.

Airports reducing the number of flights. Businesses closing. Give it a couple of years, and there could be a real dispersal of the work force. Let Montana and Kansas see how much fun it will be when the population doubles or triples and they have to put in new water lines and sewer lines and new roads and power plants. They could take a field trip to Florida and just take a good look.

But, before that, the people who live in the flyover center of our nation will start to notice things. They will notice that the things they make and sell to the millions of people on the east and west coasts aren’t being ordered any more.

All those cattle which are sent to the slaughter houses and then to all the supermarkets and stores on Long Island and New Jersey and Los Angeles won’t have to be sent there any more, because people are cutting back. The family with $8,000 in medical expenses they can’t deduct, or the people who have to pay another $4,000 in school taxes will no longer be eating as much hamburger.

That, I think, they will notice. Long before they find out that their kids aren’t being admitted to all those colleges in New England or California because out-of-state tuition for them has doubled or tripled.

But, maybe, one of the college professors who has a little more free time will write a really good book, and the students in Kansas and Nebraska will read it and learn something. Call it trickle-down education.

Well, back to the holidays and the baby and the Friday After Thanksgiving Day of Gaming. And, in a week or two, Puerto Rico. I promise!

The Amazing Lindsey

This is all about the amazing Lindsey Pratt. She is really something, although - until I did a little research - I had no idea just what that something was.

I first met her a couple of weeks ago. She came to my house for just a minute, but she really impressed me with her common sense, her love of family, her middle class roots and her knowledge of the tax code.

Well, she wasn’t really in my house. She was on television. In a commercial.

There she was, with a man who was obviously her husband - he didn’t really say much - just pushing a child on her backyard swing. Or, maybe it was her neighbor’s swing or her daughter’s swing. It doesn’t matter.

She was dressed in a way that said “solid middle class.” Her accent was neutral, couldn’t tell if she was a city mouse or a country mouse. Didn’t look rich. Didn’t look poor. Just one of us.

Except for just one thing. She had read the tax code and the changes that Congress is planning to make in the tax code.

Well, that was amazing enough, because - when the commercials started - almost no one in Congress had even seen the tax code changes. Certainly none of the Democrats, and certainly not most of the Republicans. No committee hearings on the changes. No testimony by experts. No nothing.

But, there she was. “I read it,” she told me. And, she said an independent study - it was a short commercial, so she didn’t have time to name it - said that it would save the average family (people like her and me, I guess) more than $1,200 a year. Good deal.

Then she told me that my Congressman, Lee Zeldin, was a big supporter of the tax cut plan and that I had to support him in the upcoming election. Well, that’s fair. After all, he is putting more than $1,200 a year into my pocket. And his fellow Republicans say this will create more jobs and improve the economy. Good deal all around.

At the very end, there was some white lettering at the bottom of the last frame of her commercial. It told me that the ad was paid for by the American Action Network. How patriotic is that!

Like I said, amazing.

                                                       But, It Is All A Lie

I don’t know where to begin counting the lies in this little commercial. I don’t know where to start exploring the enormity of its deceptions. Or its hyperbole.

But, we could start with the obvious. There is no Republican tax plan yet. It is still being written. My independent analysis says that it will cost me somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 a year - that’s because all my state taxes, school taxes, medical expenses and other deductions like interest on student loans will no longer be deductible - and will create real, unspoken hardships down the road when the state and the town and the schools and all the other places that now tax me lose their federal aid and have to charge me even more. Heck, even if I did get Lindsey’s $1,200, it would go away in a heartbeat when my town or my school district sees its state aid cut because the money is no longer coming to the state from the federal government.

Oh, yes, federal aid really does come down to the state. Ever notice those signs along the big roads being repaired or widened that tells you who is really paying for the work?

And, another thing. The Amazing Lindsey didn’t just come into my living room. She’s gone into a lot of living rooms. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions? Who knows. How many living rooms are there in more than 30 Congressional districts across the nation that are being targeted?

There was Lee Zeldin in New York, of course. Also Martha McSally in Arizona, Mike Coffman in Colorado, Brian Mast in Florida, Mark Meadows in North Carolina, Rodney Frelinghuysen in New Jersey, Jim Jordan in Ohio...33 in all. It is costing the American Action Network $2 million for its targeted media blitz furthering the tax reform movement.

How do I know? It’s posted on the American Action Network website.

                                      So, Just Who is Lindsey?

Now all of this made me wonder just who Lindsey Pratt is. Maybe an actress, or maybe a model. Maybe some kind of authority on tax reform. So, I tried to look her up. And, I failed.

Now there are lots of people named Lindsey Pratt listed when you Google the name. Too many to look at. But none of the first hundred or so seemed to match the person in the ad. So, I tried looking at images. It was a real experience.

There are hundreds of pictures of Lindsey Pratt. The college student. The businessman. The kid on the basketball team. One rather risque image of an attractive young woman. Young, elderly, old, young, black, white. But none of them seemed to match the Lindsey Pratt who has been coming into my living room, making the outrageous claim that she has read a tax bill that hasn’t been written yet.

And who, you ask, is behind the American Action Network? Good luck finding out.

The American Action Network is a private, not-for-profit 501(c)4, which means it does not have to file a lot of public disclosure documents. It was created in 2010, after the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that private organizations can spend unlimited money on political campaigning. And, amazingly, the new group managed to spend $26 million that year on federal elections, money that - if individual donors had spent it - would have to be reported. Now the Koch brothers were among the early founders, which could have helped with the funds. Or, maybe, it managed to save some rent money by sharing office space with Karl Rove’s American Crossroads PAC.

Oh, yes, one other thing. Lee Zeldin says that he can not vote for the Republican tax bill in its current form. Seems like too many of the people who live in his district will be losing a lot of money when they can no longer deduct their state taxes or school taxes or medical expenses. Little things like that.