Should Puerto Rico even want to be admitted right now?

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That's what you'll see on the news, to keep your collective knees from jerking. What you won't see are all the US theocrats drifting away on an ice floe in the Canadian political tradition

Puerto Rico has a sweet deal with the U.S. All of the benefits of statehood and few of the costs. I think the U.S. should make Puerto Rico an independent country and impose the same visa and immigration quotas on the Puerto Ricans as we do on other Carribean countries.

ruveyn

Whatever the outcome of any referendum, the question really is moot. The status quo will be maintained.

First of all, it's unlikely that the U.S. would grant Puerto Rico independence & full sovereignty even if that's what a clear majority of its residents &/or expatriates want. With the exception of the Philippines, the U.S. has NEVER given up any of its colonies. (The Canal Zone was leased, & even so, the Panama Canal Treaty was fiercely opposed by conservatives.)

Statehood is out of the question, because it would surely be blocked by the Republicans. First of all, they would never allow into the union a state whose first language is Spanish. Second, & more important, they would never allow into the union a new state that would practically guarantee the election of 2 liberal Democratic senators & 6 liberal Democratic representatives.

Lol, I'm not so sure about that. They're far from being lockstep Democrats, take a look at Luis Fortuno as well.

Ya Puerto Rico is hardly dominated by liberal Democrats. Luis Fortuno would be one of most fiscally conservative governors in the US and almost all Hispanics are culturally conservative.

At present, politics in P.R. is disconnected from that of the mainland - it even has its own political parties. If it were a state, that wouldn't be the case. With the exception of Florida, Hispanic voters have always tilted toward the Democratic Party, more in some years than others. But it's a safe bet that they will tilt more strongly in this direction in the foreseeable future, what with all the abuse the Republican Party heaps on immigrants & Spanish-speaking people in general.

Apparently the liberals automaticaly see minorities as panhandlers and therefor guaranteed to vote democrat.....

Last edited by Raptor on 14 Mar 2012, 4:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think they're Koolaid enough to abide by an economy getting destroyed though, that's too much insult to their intelligence on ethnicity. I also really doubt that Republicans would block their entry as a 51st state on such things - a Democratic congress might do something like that if we were dealing with a majority Republican commonwealth but the two parties don't necessarily abide by the same behavior when voting direction is secondary, hence projecting Democrat strategy on Republicans might not be a very good predictor of outcome.

What evidence do you have to suggest that electing Democrats would destroy their economy? Remember it was Republican rule that destroyed our economy. And there is no doubt that the Republicans in Congress would block entry of these grounds - this is why the District of Columbia also has no hope of fair representation in Congress.

Remind me of the root causes of the crash as well as which party controlled the house when the money started flowing fast and loose from 2007 forward.

If I was Puerto Rican I would want independence.

Root causes were financial crisis of 2008, the housing & foreclosure crisis, & excessive consumer debt. For the first I would blame the recklessness & outright criminality in the banking sector, which was facilitated by the gutting & finally repeal of Glass-Steagall, & the fact that regulatory agencies (in this case primarily the SEC) were effectively asleep on the job. The housing crisis too was brought on by collusion & criminality (referring broadly here to the ratings agencies, Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, mortgage banks, etc.), & here too the regulators (primarily the OTS but others as well) failed to do their job. Finally there was the excess of consumer debt, which was a long-running problem.

While all these problems were many years in the making, the Republicans in Congress & George W. Bush can rightly be assigned much of the blame. It was their breathtaking fiscal recklessness, taking us from budget surpluses to (at the time) record deficits, even while times were relatively good, that left us in a much worse position fiscally to deal with the crisis when it hit. Second was the Republicans' ideological hostility to regulation, which if effectively applied could have prevented the banking crisis. Third, they can be faulted for their passivity - they basically sat on their hands as things were getting worse from late 2006 onward. (But they did try to amend the constitution to outlaw flag-burning & same-sex marriage - at least we know what their priorities were!)

By the time things came to a head, the Democrats had regained control of Congress. To contain the crisis they had to enact the unpopular & politically costly bank bailouts. (Failure to act here would have turned the Great Recession into a second Great Depression.) In an effort to soften the blow to ordinary Americans & prime the economic pump, they enacted the economic stimulus, & while its effectiveness is certainly debatable, most economists believe that it did much to avoid a much deeper economic downturn. They also addressed the problems in the financial industry with Dodd-Frank & its Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Credit Card Act, student loan reform & other acts. Of course, they paid a dear political price for all of this.

Now that the Republicans are back in a position of power, we can again see what their priorities are - breaking unions, putting a stop to abortion, contraception & women's health services, forcing our government to the brink of default.

Sorry to go off on this tangent, but you asked.

I'm at least glad you know that much; so if I mention IBBEA of 1994 changes to CRA of 1977 and FIRREA of 1984 you'll likely be able to figure out where I'm going. Yes, Gramm-Leach-Bliley had an impact but it was just part of the chain.


Clinton road a 1/3 cut to defense, something that GWB had to reinstitute. I'd claim that where GWB's congress really started blowing money was a No Child Left Behind that they, for the sake of getting through, ended up turning into a largely dead-end cash cow.


If you watch the stepping stones, plenty of the major rungs - most actually - were enacted by Democrat controlled congresses. The only thing that could be argued against that is to say it was some of both parties that made it happen.


Public employee unions are a problem (teachers is a great example) and when we have companies getting cannibalized by their unions (GM for example) the paradigm has clearly shifted and we're not talking about being in favor of freedom vs. being in favor of a Banana Republic anymore.


Paleos would force abortion as an issue, as for the contraception issue that's a farse: its pretty much saying that being against birth control provisions being forced on Catholic institutions (which is against their tenets) = wanting to outlaw all birth-control. Hysterical gibberish without a gram of honesty.



and this part doesn't even make any sense. If anything both parties have been playing chicken with ideology but I'd have to argue that one wants to spend us into oblivion and keep doing so, all the while selling the make-believe that we levy significantly more income and capital gains taxes on the '1%' that it'll fix our problems. Its crazy.

I used to work for a mortgage bank, so I do have inside knowledge about how this all worked. I knew it would all collapse - the only surprise was that it took as long as it did. With regard to the rest, that's just a matter of political viewpoint. I'll offer a truce & let's just agree to disagree.

With or without being in the mortgage industry it would take quite a strange person to see that someone could be turned down for an apartment, go across the street, get a mortgage for a house, and not realize that something was seriously wrong.