Mexico president gambles with left-leaning reform

[Judi Lynn]

Mexico president gambles with left-leaning reform
Updated: 1:05 p.m. Monday, Sept. 9, 2013 | Posted: 1:05 p.m. Monday, Sept. 9, 2013

By E. EDUARDO CASTILLO

The Associated Press

MEXICO CITY —


President Enrique Pena Nieto is gambling that a surprise plan to increase social spending through taxes on the wealthy can quiet much of the left-wing opposition to his most ambitious proposal, opening Mexico's state oil company to private investment, analysts and politicians said Monday.

Pena Nieto took aback critics and supporters alike Sunday night with a fiscal reform plan that would introduce Mexico's first national pension and unemployment insurance plans, along with its first capital gains tax, its first carbon tax and its first tax on sugary drinks.

The plan would also close a series of tax loopholes and raises the tax rate on the country's highest earners.

Many of the measures are aimed at what was long thought to be the fiscal reform's primary goal: increasing one of the lowest tax collection rates in the developed world, analysts said. Others are clearly designed to placate the left as Pena Nieto tries to push through a reform allowing private investment in the underperforming state oil firm, Pemex, before the end of his first year in office, they said.

More:
http://www.ktvu.com/news/ap/business/mexico-tax-plan-adds-sweeping-new-social-programs/nZqrZ/

[factsarenotfair]

1. Such a demonstration of concern for his people!!!

Oh, wait, he's just pretending to care to get oil privatization. I'm guessing some crisis would not allow the social spending but the corporations would still get their hands on the oil.

[a la izquierda]

2. Like it or not, Pemex isn't productive...

and the money it would take the government to fix it should go to the desperately poor in Mexico's cities and rural areas. The rich in Mexico are obscenely wealthy.
I'm not a Peña Nieto fan, but I´m a pragmatist when it comes to a country as profoundly unequal as Mexico.

ETA: When I lived there, I became a totally different person. I've never been faced with 8 year olds working in the street and the elderly left to die.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Had you been a Republican, you would not have been changed

by your experience in Mexico. You probably wouldn't have noticed at all, and had you noticed, you would have felt unclean because you got too close to poor people.

It's O.K. to behave in unclean ways, lie, cheat, steal, work to create fear, and hatred, but that's just fine as long as they're materially comfortable.

It is horrendous realizing how much poverty is even here in the U.S. where the poor are loathed, and despised by those who obviously have had opportunities simply not available to the less fortunate.

What a shame Mexico has been left so vulnerable to the largest, greediest predators at the desperate expense of the people who MUST work to live, and for whom the future seems already written at birth, and it won't be good.

[a la izquierda]

4. You're so right. My entire family is conservative...

they do not understand where this weird socialist came from. In speaking with my family, they firmly believe that if you're poor it's because you want to be that way. I also think that there's a pervading sense in this country of what constitutes acceptable, normal actions for the non-poor: having a nice lawn, well-dressed kids, a nice car, a nice house. So what may seem middle class on the facade could in fact hide poverty. But they've been convinced that this is the dream and we've become convinced that we're invincible.


Mexico is a failed dream for millions in a place where there were once so many riches. I really believe that the rich have squandered that country at the expense of their poverty-stricken countrymen, just like happens here. The rich sneer at the indigenous masses, just like people sneer at our lower class people of color here.

Gah, I just watched Sin hombre last night before bed, and now I'm full of scorn.