Improvisación by Grupo CNE
Por Miguel Soto-Class
El mes de junio trae siempre la misma fuente de ansiedad. Y no me refiero a qué hacer con las nenas durante las vacaciones de verano. A lo que me refiero es a la tragicomedia anual de cómo allegar recursos a las defalcadas arcas públicas y cuadrar el presupuesto gubernamental. Este año, a pesar de las medidas correctivas que se han tomado para subsanar las deficiencias del Sistema de Retiro y mantener la credibilidad ante las casas acreditadoras, la situación es particularmente crítica. La deuda pública equivale casi al Producto Nacional Bruto, los mercados financieros tienen cada vez menos paciencia, y nuestro andamiaje institucional y político parece ser incapaz de aportar soluciones efectivas y mucho menos duraderas. Vivimos de crisis en crisis, poniéndole parches a un dique que estalla por todas las esquinas.
Es preciso abordar el problema en su fondo. Correr el gobierno de Puerto Rico y proveer el nivel actual de servicios cuesta $10,400 millones al año mientras que los ingresos apenas llegan a poco más de $9,600 millones. Esto se llama “déficit estructural”, y este año ronda los $775 millones. Hasta ahora nuestra respuesta para atajar este hueco era acudir al mercado financiero y tomar prestado lo que hiciera falta. Pero la deuda pública ya ronda los $70,000 millones, y hay mucha incertidumbre en cuanto a nuestra capacidad de cumplir con todas las obligaciones.
Este año, el Ejecutivo propuso alrededor de $1,000 millones en nuevos impuestos, pero el juego político, las protestas de los grupos afectados y la simple irrealidad de algunas de las ideas han dejado un cuadro incierto, incoherente y desarticulado. La amnistía contributiva apenas ha recaudado una cuarta parte de los ingresos proyectados; el sector de negocios no tiene idea del monto y la forma en que se van a aplicar los nuevos impuestos, y la capacidad de maniobra del Gobierno para recortar gastos está seriamente limitada porque una parte importante de los recursos ya están comprometidos con pagar lo que ha tomado prestado en años anteriores.
Así que otra vez el mes de junio nos agarra en un nuevo intento -desesperado y fútil- de rearmar el presupuesto gubernamental. La realidad es que el dique no aguanta más parches: tenemos que buscar una solución permanente, ampliando las fuentes de ingreso del Gobierno, no de forma improvisada, caótica y confusa como se hace todos los años, sino de una manera coordinada, coherente y duradera.
En el Centro para una Nueva Economía hemos propuesto insistentemente desde el 2006 la necesidad de realizar una reforma contributiva profunda y completa, que estabilice las finanzas públicas, captando recursos en áreas que ahora permanecen al margen, y brindándole racionalidad al sistema.
Entre los componentes principales de esta reforma debería estar la revalorización del impuesto a la propiedad, la simplificación del impuesto al consumo y la imposición de un gravamen al valor añadido. No somos los únicos que estamos haciendo este llamado. En el 2010, varios reconocidos economistas desarrollaron para la Fundación del Colegio de Contadores Públicos un destacado estudio que sentaba las bases para una reforma integral del sistema.
Así que una vez pasadas las ansiedades presupuestarias de este año, hay que pensar a largo plazo. Propongamos que este sea el último presupuesto improvisado de Puerto Rico y empecemos desde ahora a desarrollar una reforma contributiva y fiscal para nuestro gobierno que sea completa, integral y coherente. Nosotros nos apuntamos como siempre para contribuir y colaborar. Quedan emplazados nuestros gobernantes a ver si logran ejercer el liderato necesario.
El autor preside el CNE. Esta columna se publicó originalmente en el diario El Nuevo Día el 26 de junio de 2013.
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Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa. (EPA/JOSE JACOME)
Ecuador’s hints that it might grant asylum to Edward Snowden, as it did with WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange, have been widely perceived (including by me) as more about Ecuador’s confrontational foreign policy than its sympathy for Snowden.
Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa has used his sponsorship of Assange to portray himself as standing up to the United States and United Kingdom, bolstering his self-made image as an anti-American nationalist. The Washington Post’s Juan Forero recently described him as “a brash populist leader who savors tussling with the United States.” Meanwhile, Correa’s government has tightened laws allowing it to target media critics and political dissenters, practices would seem antithetical to the causes that Assange and Snowden stand for.
It’s worth noting, then, a datapoint that contradicts my earlier thesis that Ecuador would foster Snowden mostly to tweak the United States. Time magazine’s Girish Gupta reports, from Ecuador, the story of a man from Belarus who won asylum in the far-away Latin American country. Ecuador’s decision to grant the man asylum would not seem to serve Correa’s foreign policy or his domestic image. The case suggests that Ecuador sometimes does grant political asylum for reasons other than the ones I suggested for the Snowden case. But it’s complicated.
Belarus is the last remaining dictatorship in Europe. Alexander Barankov was a policeman in the capital city of Minsk, in the financial crimes unit. He uncovered what he believed to be systemic government corruption. Barankov saw evidence that top Belarus officials, including the president, were illegally smuggling energy resources to fund their personal bank accounts. When state security caught on to him, he fled, first to Russia (sound familiar?) then to Egypt and, finally, Ecuador. Like Snowden, he started spilling his country’s secrets online and, eventually, won asylum.
Here’s the hitch: unlike Assange, who was sheltered by Ecuador’s London embassy as soon as he fled there from house arrest, Barankov had to push for three years before he won asylum. That’s actually not unusual for non-famous asylum-seekers, including those who land in the United States. What’s unusual is that in June 2012, Ecuador’s government arrested Barankov and held him for 84 days as it considered Belarus’s long-standing extradition request. The timing was strange; Barankov had been in the country for years at that point. But Time’s profile points out that he was arrested just three weeks before Correa met with Belarus’s president, the same man whom Barankov had publicly accused of corruption. The Time story suggests that Correa’s government may have used Barankov “as a pawn” to ease tension with Belarus.
Nothing about this one case definitively proves or disproves any benevolence or self-interest guiding Ecuador in potentially sheltering Snowden. And, given Snowden’s high profile and his status as a sort of symbol, it seems unlikely that Correa’s government would throw him jail as they did Barankov. Still, it’s an interesting datapoint in understanding this Latin American country’s emerging penchant for sheltering Westerners wanted by their governments.
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By CB Online Staff
Gov. Alejandro García Padilla addressed Puerto Rico’s status issue during his official trip to Spain on Wednesday.
“Puerto Ricans don’t want to be a U.S. state,” he said. “We are Puerto Ricans. We are a nation, not a province of another country. We want to keep being Puerto Ricans.”
García Padilla, who heads the commonwealth Popular Democratic Party, said statehood was rejected by island voters in the status referendum last November.
“We decided voluntarily to have a relationship of citizenship and closeness with the U.S., but we aren’t going to stop being Puerto Ricans and Latin Americans,” he said.
Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony from the 1500s until 1898, when the island was ceded to the U.S. as booty from the Spanish-American War.
MEXICO CITY June 27, 2013 (AP)
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield says the amount of illegal drugs entering the United States from the Caribbean has risen, a sign drug cartels are looking for new routes as Mexico and Central American boost anti-drug enforcement.
Brownfield says that last year about 9 percent of all illicit drugs that entered the United States came from the Caribbean, compared to about 4 or 5 percent in 2011.
He says authorities should focus on promoting development in the Caribbean because logic suggests drug cartels will return to trafficking routes used during the 1980s and 1990s.
Brownfield spoke Wednesday, the same day the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime released its annual report saying there are indications cocaine trafficking has increased in the Western Hemisphere's Atlantic Ocean.
"We are a ghetto under the ELA" - Jaime Benson editorial
