The Puerto Rico Report strives to cover all the news about Puerto Rico’s status. In 2015, the most popular stories covered many different aspects of this issue.
The fact that this story is one of the most popular of the year shows that people continue to be confused. As readers have heard and seen more stories about Puerto Rico’s debt crisis, they’ve naturally wondered how this related to the U.S. as a whole, and we’ve been glad to provide a clear answer.
As we consider Puerto Rico’s status, the question arises: what does Puerto Rico bring to the table as a territory, and what would Puerto Rico bring as a state? In fact, Puerto Rico has valuable natural resources, including the only rain forest in the United States.
One common excuse for the unequal treatment of Puerto Rico by the federal government is the claim that Puerto Ricans don’t pay taxes. It’s not true. Like more than 40% of the Americans who lives in States, Puerto Ricans don’t pay federal income tax on local earnings, but they do pay payroll taxes. Puerto Rico contributes more to federal coffers than a number of states.
We did our best to discern what Trump’s position might be on Puerto Rico’s status, since the presidential candidate hasn’t made a statement on the subject. We’re still waiting for statements on Puerto Rico’s status from quite few of the candidates in the upcoming election.
We are proud of Puerto Rico’s impressive record of service in the U.S. military. Many of our readers don’t realize how long and distinguished a record this is. We encourage all our readers to browse the War Heroes section of this website to get a fuller understanding of the contributions of Puerto Rico.
A post at a science blog examined some of the ideas of an outdated idea called “eugenics” — the idea that human beings can and should be bred for performance as plants are. In the course of the discussion, the writer said that by some measures, the perfect human is a Puerto Rican woman. Media misquotes and misundeerstandings were rife, so we provided a simple explanation.
It is clear that, under the U.S. constitution, there are only two viable options for Puerto Rico: statehood, or independence with or with out a relationship with the U.S. This post examines the history of voting on independence for Puerto Rico, and compares two former U.S. territories that became either a state (Hawaii) or independent (the Philippines).
We explored a report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation on poverty among the children of Puerto Rico, and examined the implications of this poverty for the territory. Puerto Rico’s poverty level has been used as an argument against statehood, but States are better off financially than territories.
One of the early attempts to stave off the current fiscal troubles in Puerto Rico included crowdsourcing ideas to bolster the economy. One of the ideas was to legalize sex trade and marijuana, and some early reports suggested that the governor was considering the idea. In fact, marijuana for medical use was legalized.
Recent discussions about Puerto Rico’s economy have looked at the presence of U.S. companies in Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, some of the companies that use Puerto Rico to avoid taxes do so without bringing jobs to the Island. This kind of tax fiddle won’t benefit Puerto Rico.
