Leadership Quote by Dick Thornburgh

“Yet” does a lot of work here: it’s the pivot word of prosecution, the moment a fact gets framed as a grievance. Dick Thornburgh’s line is technically true in the narrow way political lines often are. Puerto Rico residents generally don’t pay federal income tax on Puerto Rico-sourced income, but they do pay payroll taxes in many cases, and they pay a host of local taxes. The point of the sentence isn’t to educate; it’s to set up an argument that Puerto Rico is asking for something it hasn’t “earned,” or that the mainland is being played.

The subtext is moral accounting. By bundling “individuals and corporations,” Thornburgh collapses very different realities into one neat target: the average Puerto Rican and the tax-optimizing multinational become rhetorically interchangeable. That fusion is useful if your goal is to stoke resentment or to justify limiting aid, tightening rules, or delaying political status reforms. It primes the listener to think in terms of freeloading rather than in terms of colonial governance, constrained fiscal sovereignty, or the island’s lack of voting representation in Congress.

Context matters because this claim tends to surface at moments of crisis or negotiation: budget shortfalls, debt restructuring, disaster relief, or statehood debates. The sentence functions like a tollbooth in the conversation: before Puerto Rico can be seen as deserving, it must first be made suspect. It’s a clean, memorable fact-shaped weapon that turns complexity into leverage.