[Yesterday, I called for the mainstream media, and/or the news section of the New York Times, to make amends for its Deal Book section's inhumane assessment of the island's economic problems. Deal Book's take was that Puerto Rico's
collapsing fortunes was "of outsize importance to the rest of the
United States because its debt is widely held by individual investors
through mutual funds."
Well today, on its edgy left column, characterized by urgent italic headlines, the Times
features Lisette Álvarez's take on the story, which I guess I have to
admit is somewhat more humane. But, with all due respect to Álvarez--who
has done some decent reporting over the years--this piece continues to
reinforce several neoliberal talking points, such as, Puerto Rico is
poor, Puerto Rico is irresponsible with money, Puerto Rico is a hot and
bothered beach and salsa place whose time is running out, and the US
really doesn't have much to do with Puerto Rico's current predicament.
Below, in the tradition of my exegesis of a Times red-baiting piece on Bill de Blasio last fall, is my critical analysis of the story (my comments in bold):]
SAN JUAN, P.R. — Alexis Sotomayor has many reasons to stay in Puerto
Rico: his two children; his mother and their gossip sessions over plates
of fried rice; (Fried, with no beans?) and the balm of salt and sun that leavens his life on the island.
But the artisanal soap business (Would this be any more successful in many parts of the US?) that
Mr. Sotomayor built is barely hanging on amid rising costs and taxes,
and sales that have sunk by 40 percent in five years. Crime is rampant;
his girlfriend was nearly carjacked at gunpoint recently. So last month
he boarded a flight to Orlando, Fla., to interview for a job at a rum distillery in the hope of joining the ever-growing Puerto Rican diaspora.
“I don’t see it improving,” said Mr. Sotomayor, a 47-year-old chemical engineer. “I see it getting worse. It’s the uncertainty. What am I going to do — wait until it gets worse?”
Puerto Rico’s slow-motion economic crisis skidded to a new low last
week when both Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s downgraded its debt to
junk status, brushing aside a series of austerity measures taken by the
new governor, including increasing taxes and rebalancing pensions. But
that is only the latest in a sharp decline leading to widespread fears
about Puerto Rico’s future. In the past eight years, Puerto Rico’s
ticker tape of woes has stretched unabated: $70 billion in debt, a 15.4
percent unemployment rate, a soaring cost of living, pervasive crime,
crumbling schools and a worrisome exodus of professionals and
middle-class Puerto Ricans who have moved to places like Florida and
Texas. (A recent study argued that the majority of the exodus are not professionals. Would that make it any less worrisome?
The situation has grown so dire that this tropical island, known for
its breathtaking beaches, salsero vibe and tax breaks, is now mentioned
in the same breath as Detroit, with one significant difference. Puerto
Rico, a United States territory of 3.6 million people that is treated in large part like a state, cannot declare bankruptcy.
From bottom to top, Puerto Ricans are watching it unfold with a mixture of disbelief and stoicism.
Alejandro García Padilla, who was elected Puerto Rico’s governor by a
sliver of a margin in 2012, said that after he began to wade deeply
into the island’s economic and social quagmire, his fight-or-flight
instincts kicked into high gear.
“I thought about asking for a recount,” Mr. García Padilla, 42, said
with a grin during a recent interview in La Fortaleza, the 500-year-old
government residence, recalling, among other things, the $2.2 billion
deficit. “But now it’s too late.”
A sense of pessimism pervades on the island. Streets are lined with
empty storefronts in San Juan and in smaller cities like Mayagüez; small
businesses, hit hard by high electricity, water and tax bills and hurt
by drops in sales, have closed and stayed closed.
Schools sit shuttered either because of disrepair or because of a
dwindling number of students. In this typically convivial capital,
communities have erected gates and bars to help thwart carjackers and
home invaders. Illegal drugs, including high-level narcotrafficking, are
one of the few growth industries. (No mention of how the US drug war has shifted shipping routes from Mexico and Colombia to the Caribbean, see pp. 15-16 of linked PDF)
Puerto Rico, about 1,000 miles from Miami, has long been poor. (Lack
of context here–it is poor only in comparison to the US–because of
US propping up economy, it is better off than its Caribbean neighbors
and much of Latin America) Its per capita income is around
$15,200, half that of Mississippi, the poorest state. Thirty-seven
percent of all households receive food stamps; in Mississippi, the total
is 22 percent.
But the extended recession has hit the middle-class hardest of all,
economists said. Jobs are still scarce, pension benefits for some are
shrinking and budgets continue to tighten. Even many people with
paychecks have chosen simply to parlay their United States citizenship
into a new life on the mainland.
Puerto Rico’s drop in population has far outpaced that of American
states. In 2011 and 2012, the population fell by nearly 1 percent,
according to census figures. From July 2012 to July 2013, it declined
again by 1 percent, or about 36,000 people. That is more than seven
times the drop in West Virginia, the state with the steepest population
losses.
A Lack of Hope
Coupled with a falling birthrate, (we’ve seen this movie before) the
decline is raising worries about how Puerto Rico will thrive with a
rapidly aging population and such a large share of jobless residents. (The share of aging population is not far off from Florida’s; the large amount of jobless residents are presumably willing to work if opportunities are created.) Of
the island’s 3.67 million people, only one million work in the formal
economy. The island has one of the lowest labor participation rates in
the world, with only 41.3 percent of working-age Puerto Ricans in jobs;
one in four works for the government. (Is the low participation rate voluntary? Or the result of a totally stagnant economy?)
“Today, Puerto Ricans with jobs are moving to the U.S.,” said Orlando
Sotomayor, an economist at the University of Puerto Rico and the
brother of Alexis. “Even people in their 40s and 50s, college professors
with complete job security, are doing so. Some are starting all over.
The phenomenon is highly uncommon and underscores the lack of hope that
the ship can or will be righted.”
The current exodus rivals the one in the 1950s, when job shortages on
the island forced farmers and rural residents to find factory work in
cities like New York and Boston. Today, it is doctors, teachers,
engineers, nurses, professors who are leaving Puerto Rico behind. (Again, see study that shows the exodus is mostly working-class)
Just about everyone in Puerto Rico has a relative who left recently
for Florida, New York, Texas or Virginia, among others. But the decision
is never easy. Fathers leave behind children. Houses must be rented or
sold at a loss in a glutted market. Businesses must be shut. And English
must be polished, or in some cases learned, in a hurry.
Alexis Sotomayor said that on his January flight to Orlando, two
acquaintances sitting nearby were also headed there hoping to find work.
“Going out there in the morning and returning in the evening, after an
interview,” he said.
After Coca-Cola laid him off in 2001, Mr. Sotomayor started
experimenting with distilling plant extracts. He found he could make
natural soaps and decided to go into business for himself, a move that
would allow him more time to spend with his children.
Business boomed for years. So much so that he moved his homespun
facility out of his house in 2005 and into a small building he bought in
San Juan. He found that he was earning more money making soap than
working as a chemical engineer.
Then in 2008, the recession pounded at his door. (This is a
missed opportunity to show how the island economy is directly tied to
the US’s, and how it’s not a dependence on food stamps or a
low-participation rate by workers that’s causing problems) For
five years, he has tried to lift his business; he went to fairs around
the island, set up booths in shopping malls, promoted his flower-infused
soaps, candles and lotions on television. He divvied up his store last
year and decided to rent out half the building. He let go two of his
four employees.
But his expenses mounted, including $600 a month in power bills, more
than double what consumers pay on the mainland. The sky-high cost is a
consequence of Puerto Rico’s inefficient government-run monopoly on
electricity and its 67 percent dependency on petroleum for electric
power. (This is pretty much a neoconservative talking point
emerging from the previous extremist pro-statehood administration. One
of that group’s founding fathers, Carlos Romero Barceló, has this take on the reasons for the high cost of electricity on the island. This is an alternative idea for generating electricity through green technology.) Other
utilities are exorbitant, too. Last year, water rates rose 60 percent
in a bid to help cut the state-run water company’s debt.
The cost of private tuition for his children, a total of $2,000 a
month, is one nonnegotiable expense for him. Like most middle- and
upper-class Puerto Ricans, he long ago lost faith in the island’s
troubled public schools. Public school enrollment has plummeted in
recent years, in part because of declining birthrates but also because
of the schools’ poor quality. (The reason for
this is traceable not only to PR’s flagging economy as a result of being
tied to the US but the disinvestment in public education that the US is
such an invaluable leader of. Why encourage more spiraling pension
demands?)
“Many parents, even lower-middle-class parents, put all their money
into their children’s private school, even if sometimes they have to
live in rented houses,” said Nilsa Velazquez, an economics professor at
the University of Puerto Rico who plans to move to Virginia with her
family this summer.
For many, the high rate of violent crime has been the capper. There
were 1,136 murders in 2011, a record and far higher than the mainland’s
rate. It fell to 883 homicides last year, a point of pride for the
governor.
But the damage had been done. Life here has always been full of
trade-offs, including a high cost of living. Now, though, there is
little left to trade.
‘Live Here Just to Survive?
“Between making less money and not knowing when someone will jump
you, that pushed the quality of life very low,” Alexis Sotomayor said.
“To live here just to survive? No, thanks.” (A missed
opportunity to talk about those who stay on the island not just to
survive, but to engage in their culture, live in close-knit families,
and experience a solidarity with those for whom it is important to be
Puerto Rican in Puerto Rico. There are many professionals who are
sacrificing for that and are not mentioned here.)
For Ms. Velazquez, the tenured professor who lives in Mayagüez, and
her husband, who works for the Air Force Reserve, the mental
calculations were similar. She is 50, she said. The last thing she
wanted to do was give up her job as an economics professor, move her two
teenage children and uproot her 76-year-old mother, who speaks no
English and has never left the island.
But she has grown so disillusioned with the University of Puerto Rico
Mayagüez — one of the crown jewels of the island’s higher-education
system, where she has worked for nearly three decades — that she no
longer views it as a viable option for her children. In the face of
continuing economic stress, the University of Puerto Rico has suffered
the loss of a steady stream of valued professors and funding for
important research projects. Even tenured professors have left, Ms.
Velazquez said.
“The most important thing for me is my children’s education, and the
second is my quality of life,” she said. “You see all of these fees and
taxes going up, but the streets are terrible.”
This summer she will try to rent out her house rather than selling it
and take a loss, and will move to Fairfax County, Va., where her
husband will work for the federal government and her children will
attend a top public high school. As an economist with a law degree, she
is hoping to find some kind of job.
“I thought I could do anything in Puerto Rico,” she said. “Now that is gone.”
The frustrations of Mr. Sotomayor and Ms. Velazquez speak to the depth of the island’s economic problems.
The origins of the crisis, though, stretch back more than a decade.
Tax incentives have long been a draw for corporations seeking to do
business in Puerto Rico, and the island in turn has benefited from its
ability to offer such breaks, in large part structuring its economy
around them.
Tax laws were once abundantly generous, which fueled the spread of
factories that made textiles and pharmaceuticals, among other things.
That came to a crash in 2006, after the 10-year phaseout of a subsidy
that provided American firms operating in Puerto Rico with tax-free
income. Changes to the global economy and the worldwide recession
exacerbated the situation. Since 1996, factory jobs on the island
spiraled from 160,000 to 75,000. (What were these ‘changes to
the global economy’? could they have something to do with the rapid
spread of free trade agreements in Puerto Rico’s backyard that made
Puerto Rico’s wage scale too high for multinationals?)
Little was done to try to revamp the island’s economic framework. (What
was this “economic framework”? A model of external investment and tax
breaks that sucked most of the capital out of the island while paying
less-than-mainland wages to island workers, something that worked since
from the beginnings of Operation Bootstrap [something
not mentioned here] in the early 1950s, but collapsed after the
‘changes to the global economy’? Did Bill Clinton and/or Larry Summers
have anything to do with this? Of course not, Puerto Rico’s economic
problems are self-contained and largely out of the context of the US, or
its imposition of free-trade pacts.) Instead, deficits climbed and pensions spun out of control. (So
then, government workers, who made far less than their counterparts in
the US, went on a binge, encouraged by the powerful unions that support
them, extorting spiraling pensions from the island’s bloated government
bureaucracy? A likely story.) In 2006, the government shut down
for two weeks because it lacked the cash to meet expenses. The governor
moved to raise taxes. In 2010, the next governor reduced taxes and laid
off 33,000 government workers. But Puerto Rico’s governors began
borrowing even more heavily to get out of the economic logjam. (There’s
no mention here that because of Puerto Rico’s wholly dependent economy,
which was destroyed by the end of tax breaks to US corporations, the
governors had no choice but to continue borrowing, and in fact were
sucked in by vampiric banskter casino operators to go into debt so it
could be speculated on in the open market. Why is it that no one
remembers how the Great Recession was essentially caused by out of
control speculation on bad debt and not “out of control pensions”?)
“It was cheap and easy to borrow,” said Mike Soto, the president of
the Puerto Rican Center for a New Economy. “It got to the point where we
tapped out what we can borrow.” (Doesn’t this sound like the
voice of about 90% of Americans? Why is Puerto Rico being singled out as
an island that can’t control its finances?)
Painful Corrections
Last year, Mr. García Padilla, the first governor from the countryside, (Who is known to wear a jíbaro pava, apparently.) took
over. With the island’s economy a shambles, and credit agencies
threatening a downgrade to junk status, he had no choice but to take
swift action.
Economists have given him credit for acting to remedy problems that have festered for decades. (It
kind of speaks volumes that none of these economists are mentioned by
name, or whether they are from Puerto Rico or the mainland.) In
one year, he moved to overhaul three major pensions, including for
teachers, that were on a pace to run out of money soon. Two of them are
still pending final court approval. He reduced the deficit by 70
percent. And he is holding the four main debt-laden government-run
companies more accountable and insisting on more transparency.
Vowing not to lay off any more workers, he raised taxes sharply to
provide much-needed revenue and then got the legislature to approve
incentives to entice wealthy investors, like the hedge fund billionaire
John Paulson, who has invested in an exclusive beach resort and condo
complex. (Would these incentives actually
increase the tax base significantly? Isn’t this the same model that ran
Puerto Rico into the ground in the first place?) A number of
businesses have left the island, scared away by the groaning economy and
the high cost of electricity. But others have arrived or expanded, like
Eli Lilly, Seaborne Airlines and Cooper Vision.
Four days before the junk status decision, Mr. García Padilla
announced that he would present a balanced budget for next year, one
year ahead of his own schedule. But his job just got harder. Analysts
said the credit downgrades would make it harder to improve the economy.
The governor ordered agencies to cut budgets by 2 percent.
“I’ve done everything I can to avoid a downgrade,” Mr. García Padilla
said in an interview, calling the move “unjust.” “Maybe I can’t detain
the winds right now, but I can build the windmills. I am an incurable
optimist.” (The Quixote reference again shifts the blame from US
colonialism to quirky countryside governors with no options or rational
ideas.)
But not everyone is applauding. His tax increases have hit some
businesses hard, which could pose a further drag on the economy. Among
the many taxes he initiated, the governor raised the corporate tax rate
to a maximum of 39 percent. Last year, the economy continued on a slide.
“The new administration has a bookkeeping mentality as opposed to an
economic development mentality,” said Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico’s
nonvoting representative in Congress and a political opponent of the
governor. “Here you find Puerto Rico with an underlying economic problem
charging its corporations — its job creators — 39 percent. Hello!” (Pierluisi
has been supporting a Quixotic adventure to make Puerto Rico a state, a
great money-laundering operation for campaign contributors but making
absolutely no contribution to solving the island’s economic problems.
Cost-cutting conscious Congress will never approve statehood because it
necessarily means increasing entitlement payments to Puerto Rico’s
growing poverty-level population. Hello!)
Perhaps the most maligned is the new lucrative gross receipts tax,
which some owners of small- and medium-size businesses say threatens to
put them out of business. Because of the way the tax is structured, it
affects companies with less than a 5 percent net profit margin. This
means that many food-related companies, like supermarkets, and new
businesses, are hit hardest. The smaller the margin, the higher the tax.
Some stores are paying an effective tax rate of 130 percent, said
Manuel Reyes Alfonso, the vice president of a trade association that
represents the food industry. If the tax is not revised, some will be
forced to shut down and others will have to raise prices, he said.
“It is absurd,” said Mr. Reyes Alfonso. “It’s like selling the car to buy gas.”
In response, the governor is forming a committee to take a second
look at the new taxes and the island’s complicated tax code. Waivers to
the tax are available, but Mr. Reyes Alfonso said they were difficult to
obtain. (At this point this piece is blaming Puerto Rico’s
government for having borrowed too much, and then when it tries to
balance the budget by taxing private industry, it’s a ludicrous move.
Seems like the only answer is to ask government workers to work for free
until the banksters decide it’s okay for people to work for pay again.)
As he sipped coffee in the bakery section of one of his stores, José
Revuelta, the president of SuperMax grocery stores in Puerto Rico, said
he managed to expand during the recession. But now, with the gross
receipts and corporate tax cutting into his business, he is holding back
on capital investments, raises and bonuses. He said he wanted
reassurance that the tax hikes would be temporary.
“I can understand doing this on a short-term basis,” he said. “But there needs to be a plan.”
Not many are confident that a long-term plan exists to lift the
island from such a sustained crash. But it cannot get much worse, they
say. (Of course, we have a plan in the US, and it’s working, right?)
“Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to restore yourself,” said Mr.
Soto, of the Center for a New Economy. “I’m hoping that’s what’s
happening.” (Well, if Puerto Rico hits bottom, it probably won’t
be a threat to Mr. Soto, who will most likely hold onto his job so he
can make more pronouncements like these. Never underestimate the value
of an Ivy League education, I always say. But what about the people, the
ones who are not making artisanal soap, say? Where are their voices?)
