The election was pushed by the governing New Progressive Party, which has long advocated statehood for Puerto Rico and hoped to use the results to persuade Congress to take up Puerto Rico’s status issue once and for all. With the income and corporate taxes it would be due as a state, Puerto Rico would not be in its current financial mess, statehood advocates argue. If Puerto Rico had been a state in 2011, it would have received up to $3 billion in additional funding for Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income payments alone, according to a federal Government Accountability Office report. “Puerto Rico has been a colony of one master or another for over 500 years,” said José Fuentes, a former attorney general who leads a pro-statehood organization in Washington. Many people in Puerto Rico doubt that Congress will be inclined to welcome a state that would have the highest unemployment and poverty rate in the nation.

Source: New York Times June 11, 2017 18:11 UTC