They have a good point, but however, the particular independentistas I refer to are hostile to any notion of state aid for the needy. They therefore play right into the hands of the clever neoliberal discourse. Our status as a low-wage haven for corporations was enshrined in section 936 of the US internal revenue code. Section 936 basically says that American corporations that move their manufacturing facilities to PR get a hell of a tax break and holiday plus, of course, duty free access to the US market. For some reason I don't quite understand, the vast majority of companies that have rushed to benefit from section 936 are pharmaceuticals.
Nobody seems to know.
One of the charms of living in PR is that there are no statistics on anything, a phenomenon bemoaned by economist Francisco Catal . One of the main reasons that the United States subsidized Puerto Rico in such a massive scale from the sixties on was the Cuban revolution. PR's role in the holy war against communism was to serve as a showcase of democracy and prosperity in order to refute the socialist-antiimperialist ideal embodied in Cuba. Since the Soviet bloc self-destructed in 1989 and the USSR imploded in 1991, communism hasn't been the bogeyman it used to be. So Puerto Rico's artificial prosperity can be dispensed with.