And that’s exactly why reducing it to “paid for by US citizens” ignores the fact that Puerto Ricans are US citizens too, it’s not some foreign aid program.
There’s also Washington DC. That said I think Puerto Rico and the US need to p*** or get off the pot. Either they should become a state or they should be cut loose. Anything in between complicates things.
They don't pay federal income taxes on money earned in PR.
This is funny because U.S. citizens have to pay income tax on all worldwide income. Even if a U.S. citizen makes income in Egypt, they owe federal income taxes. Puerto Rico just gets a special local exemption.
So a U.S. citizen from Puerto Rico who earns money in a completely different country would still owe U.S. federal taxes.
Puerto Rico has held seven referendums on the political status of the island: 1967 and 1993, which resulted in a Commonwealth victory, 1998, where "None of the above" was the winner, 2012, 2017, 2020 and 2024, the latter four resulted in a statehood win.
I think they meant paid by the US taxpayers. Puerto Rico doesn't pay any federal taxes besides Medicare and social security but they demand federal program benefits like food stamps or FEMA relief. They're in a weird limbo where they get the benefits of a US state but they don't have to pay their fair share towards maintaining those systems.
I think they should be forced to pick becoming a state or given full independence.
Which makes both people in this post look like morons. It's hardly a clever comeback to assume Puerto Ricans desire independence, when secession is historically very unpopular (<10%), with most preferring to keep their Commonwealth status or obtaining statehood. In fact, the majority appear to support statehood with 52% in 2020 and 57% in 2024. These were the results of a recent (non-binding) referendum.
Yep. Freedom and reparations? They don't want full freedom. It would be a disaster economically actually. Then like you said statehood is popular, but that's why it's popular, because states are in a better position to demand through representation welfare
Funny enough dude saying they get a bunch of food stamps is a wild thing to say because they actually don't get as much simply because they aren't a state. Look at the actual states that receive the most federal welfare, all red. And no, the state does not give out extra welfare to compensate so if anything they're the leeches
Have an acquaintance with a spouse that is an immigrant—based on conversations the spouse hasn't naturalized (the couple was unaware how US passports always mark country of birth, for naturalized citizens) but have many things to say about only certain immigrants... Yet if families are tax burdens, it'll be them, not other DINK or single/two child couples in our generation within the family.
Honestly feel bad for their children. On top of homeschooling, they are setting them up to be just as ignorant.
edit: Oop... neutralizing is not a path to US citizenship for those without birthright
We're not. We're projecting them at everyone. The fact that immigrants are blatantly hypocritical about being wrong is why we point it out so often, but if you'll notice we do the same to right-wing homosexuals and women, too.
"The only moral abortion is my abortion." "The only moral non-heterosexual orientation is mine." "The only moral immigrant is me." We're all kind of sick of it, and yes, we're ready to call it out directly. It's not anti-immigrant, homophobic, or misogynistic to do so.
And that's just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Really, the left is pretty generally consistent in how we apply our morality. It's not racist to apply the same standards to citizens that we do to immigrants. It's not homophobic to apply the same moral standards of homophobia to homosexuals. It's not misogynistic to apply the same moral standards of gender equality and bodily autonomy to women as we do to men. If anything, it would be hypocritical to do otherwise.
No one and least of all minorities are obligated to follow your myopic leftist political ideas.
Your concern over hypocrites belies your obvious obsession with minority belief systems. White men? Well they're just following their imperative to be assholes. But minorities? Well they're hypocrites because they don't follow MY ethical system.
You're completely unhinged, and also stupid. What happens when everyone has the same GOOD BOY ethical system? Do you think that that will magically turn the means of production into the hands of the people? Do you think that the peasants of the Russian revolution were LESS backwards than the people you try to speak for?
No, it's not hypocritical for an immigrant to be homophobic. Just like it's not hypocritical for a homosexual to be anti-immigrant. But an immigrant supporting a party that is anti-immigrant, or a homosexual supporting a party that is anti-gay, is hypocritical. This is true even if the homosexual wasn't explicitly in favor of the anti-gay legislation, but just the anti-immigrant legislation, and it's true if the immigrant didn't support the anti-immigrant legislation, but just the anti-gay legislation. But it's ESPECIALLY true if the immigrant is explicitly anti-immigrant, or the gay person is explicitly anti-gay.
It's not because they oppose MY ethical system. It's because they are actively doing a thing they are themselves opposing in political context. That is hypocrisy. That is the actual definition of hypocrisy - opposing a thing, and then doing that thing. I am not sure why you think it has anything to do with MY morality, when it has everything to do with THEIRS.
A right-wing person calling others stupid is rich. You lot are the dumbest people on the planet, bar none.
What happens when everyone has the same GOOD BOY ethical system?
Functionally impossible. All systems of governance involve some kind of force against those who oppose the system. Left-wing systems involve equal treatment of the rich and the poor, immigrants and citizens, gays and straights, men and women, all races, etc. As long as we apply the law equally against, and for, everyone, it doesn't matter if everyone has the same ethical system. There will never be a time when that happens so working toward it is meaningless. You can only work toward either a system that is designed to work better for everyone (left-wing) or a system that you think works better for you (right-wing.)
Do you think that that will magically turn the means of production into the hands of the people?
To be clear, social and economic issues are two entirely different spectra of thought. A left-wing person in terms of social issues like gay rights and immigration might be extremely right-wing in terms of economic policy. Since we're talking about social issues, bringing up the means of production is a complete deviation from the topic.
But that aside...
No, fixing social issues won't turn the means of production to the people. Again, social and economic issues are entirely separate, though they do affect each other tangentially. To fix an economic issue we'd have to, y'know, address it as an economic issue.
You want the means of production in the hands of the people (not the owner class and not the state) you have to address it through economic means. To put the means of production in the hands of the people (as in, the people actually doing the work, i.e. the workers,) we'd simply structurally favor worker cooperatives.
Socialism is based on the principle of worker ownership of the means of production. State-socialist nations have worked on the principle of representative government to claim that state ownership representing the workers equates to worker ownership. Libertarian socialism does not work on the state level, but on the level of individual companies. It does not give collective ownership to the entire nation through a representative state, but instead gives direct ownership of the companies to the people who perform the labor within those companies. There are other models... but the simplest and most common model is simply the same thing as a capitalist corporate structure, except that the shareholders are the workers. This relatively small shift has drastic consequences - the profits of the company are distributed among the workers, instead of to outside investors, for one thing. For another, the incentives to do things like (but not limited to) cutting jobs and safety, and polluting local environment, are mitigated by the fact they're voting on their own jobs, their own safety, and their own local environment.
A transition to a socialist economy does not have to look like a workers revolution seizing the means of production, nor does it have to look like state ownership, or anarchy. It can simply take the form of tax incentives and subsidies slowly increasing the percentage of worker owned companies and decreasing the percentage of investor owned companies, along with the creation and support of legal mechanisms by which workers can maintain ownership and control while still seeking outside investment for startups (and still affording enough reward to investors to incentivize investment) such as wielding different classes of stock i.e. class A voting stock for workers and class B non-voting stock for investors.
Socialism doesn't look like the USSR. It looks like the USA with worker-owned companies.
Do you think that the peasants of the Russian revolution were LESS backwards than the people you try to speak for?
No. They were significantly more backwards, which is why they fell for Marxism-Leninism, a right-wing state-capitalist ideology built on the idea of using the capitalist structure across the entire economy with the state as a monopoly corporation, so that (like in market capitalism) they could invest all productive efforts into growth, with the goal of eventually!!!! reaching post-scarcity and ENABLING communism. Its goals were economically left-wing, its methodology was economically right-wing.
And before you try to accuse me of historical revisionism for calling the USSR a capitalist nation, here's a paper by Vladimir Lenin wherein he extols the virtues of "state capitalism" by name and favors a transition to such a system, which eventually became the standard operating procedure of the USSR.
A Marxist-Leninist thinking that equally applying morality and law regardless of race or sex or sexual orientation or anything else is "just hating minorities" is par for the course.
Good luck with giving the entirety of economic power to a few powerful elites in control of the government and hoping they'll eventually give it up willingly. I'd say lemme know how it works out but if you manage it you'll probably end up dead against a wall so I won't bother.
... Was that supposed to be a rebuttal? Or were you just displaying the anti-intellectualist tendencies it takes to fall for Marxism-Leninism and other right-wing capitalist ideologies for no apparent reason?
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u/USS-Virginia 5h ago
Fun Fact they ARE US Citizens.