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[quote=”davidd”]sorry
I forgot how little corruption there is in this country 🙂
[/quote]
davidd, you’re welcome to be cynical about the corruption you perceive in Costa Rica. Maybe you’re right, but adding to it will, at best, make matters worse.
The more pressing issue is that the sort of bribery that you have apparently participated in exposes you to criminal prosecution. You might be just the guy some government investigator is looking for to make an example of. Break the law if you must, but don’t brag about it. Exercise a little discretion.
[quote=”davidd”]
Davidit still went well. I gave the guy 10000 colones and he took care of the renewal without exam and blood work.
took 15 mi[/quote]
For the cost of a medical exam and blood typing you bribed a government official? Is that what you’re saying? Were it mine to do, I sure wouldn’t admit to that in public.
There are also driver’s licenses in La Uruca, Alajuela and San Ramon. We renewed ours in San Ramon last week. While there, we had them change our driver’s license numbers to be the same as our cedula numbers. Itvall went perfectly smoothly.
I think you’re confusing two data. The most recent census counted some 15,000 legal residents whose citizenship is North American. The rest are Latin American, mostly Nicaraguans but some others. I seriously doubt that there are 30,000 perpetual tourists of North American citizenship, but I have nothing to support that.
None of that has anything to do with the ownership of property. Citizens, residents, tourists and “perpetual tourists” can legally own property in Costa Rica. Likewise, legal residents can be and remain in Costa Rica and never own any property whatsoever. Property ownership is not a condition of legal residency. The two are totally independent of each other.
As a U.S. citizen who visits Costa Rica for a few weeks each year, you should not have been counted in the census any more than any other tourist. The fact that you own property is irrelevant.
The fact of the U.S. national debt is beyond dispute. Over the course of many years, successive governments (presidential administrations and congresses “working together”) have spent more money than the revenues they have raised. To finance those expenditures, Treasury securities (bonds, bills, notes, etc) have been sold to various parties.
The size of the national debt is, however, less clear. The simplest way to look at it is to count up all the Treasury securities outstanding (held by other entities, that is) plus all the unpaid interest that will eventually have to be paid and state that number as the size of the national debt. But there’s a catch.
The Social Security law mandates that all income to the Social Security Trust Fund in excess of current needs be invested in Treasury securities. So the single largest holder of Treasury securities is . . . (are you ready for it?) . . . the U.S. government itself. Yup, the government owes itself more money than it owes to anyone else.
And the irony of this situation is that, as the economy improves, as more people go back to work and pay the Social Security payroll tax, the more Treasury securities the Social Security Trust Fund will have to buy and the larger will become the national debt.
If the total of outstanding Treasury securities is (say) $16 billion but (say) $8 billion of that is held by the Social Security Trust Fund, then the net U.S. national debt is actually $8 billion, not $16 billion — for now.
The looming problem, currently projected to hit the fan around 2016, is that the revenue coming into the Social Security Trust fund from payroll taxes will no longer be enough to pay Social Security’s ongoing obligations. At that time, the Trust Fund will have to turn to Treasury and begin redeeming some of those securities it has been buying all these years. Of course, if the economy continues to improve and payroll tax revenues increase, that date will move farther into the future. And if the economy worsens, the date will move up.
Whenever Social Security begins to redeem its Treasury investments, those redemptions will be a significant drain on federal resources since they will have to be paid from then-current revenues which cannot also be used for other governmental purposes.
I seriously doubt that folks who have left Costa Rica for the U.S. or elsewhere ALWAYS terminate their VIP memberships. Most just walk away.
The most recent Costa Rican census (2011, maybe) reflected that there are about 15,000 legal residents who have come here from North America.
[quote=”ddspell12″]Moving to Costa Rica. Currening have att&t. How does it work in Costa Rica?
[/quote]
In the U.S., AT&T operates on the GSM technology that is also used in Costa Rica. So far, so good.
If you got your phone from AT&T, it is “locked” onto their system and must be “unlocked” so that it can work using another carrier’s SIM chip. Some have reported that AT&T Store employees can and will do this for you. It’s a matter of knowing the right buttons to push and in which order.
The other matter is that of the frequency on which AT&T operates and the frequency that the Costa Rican companies operate on. There are four GSM frequencies one or another of which is used all over the world — on GSM networks. Verizon, by contrast, operates on a CDMA network that is incompatible with any other. If you had a Verizon phone, you’d be totally out of luck.
Many modern GSM (3G) phones are “quad-band”. That is, they’ll detect any of the four GSM bands and use the one they find. If yours is quad-band, and if it’s unlocked, then you can buy a SIM card from the ICE kiosk in the airport, insert it in place of the AT&T SIM and chat away.
You can do a Google search on your phone’s make and model and check the technical specifications for which bands it operates on.
[quote=”costaricabill”] Oh no, that’s terrible news Scott – a loss of 140 people in 4 days. Based only on the information given, and maintaining that same velocity, we will all be gone in just under 2 years! [/quote]
That’s just awful news, Bill, but we need details. Who will be the first to go? Will it be a “first in/first out” process? “Last in/first out”? “Boy . . . Girl . . Boy . . . Girl”? Descending order by age or hat size? And who will turn out the lights?
And (I hate to bring this up), at a loss of 35 people per day, it’ll only take 1.71 years ’til the last one of us is gone. That’s about the 8th of September 2013. Anybody got a Mayan calendar?
And I really, really hate to bring this up, but could sprite be right after all? What are the chances?
[quote=”sprite”]I think it is a fine line between obsession and focus…and also between carefree and apathy.[/quote]
Yes, and you cross all the lines.
[quote=”sprite”]I do not worry too much about over population. [/quote]
What? [b]WHAT??[/b]
There’s really something you don’t obsess about, sprite? How can this be?
HSBC, ScotiaBank, CitiBank and other soundalikes are different entities in Costa Rica and North America. They may be owned by the same parent company, but their operations are totally independent of each other. And, in fact, HSBC in Costa Rica has been sold to a Columbian banking company.
So the short answer is “No”, having an account at HSBC in the States won’t do you any good at all here.
davidd, my expectation for the U.S. (and maybe the world) economy is actually pretty unfavorable. For at least as long as we persist in enriching those who could never benefit from their already accumulated wealth at the expense of everyone else, things can only get worse.
I have long believed that the U.S. should take specific, concrete steps to pay the national debt way, way down or eliminate it. There’s no question it is a drag on the economy.
The problem lies, I believe, in the political stalemate that characterizes everything. Those most advantaged pull all the strings. In the meantime, deficit spending is the only available means of seeing to the legitimate needs of an enormous majority of the human beings involved and I’m not just talking about direct welfare. Try to get around without the U.S. government’s support of highways, ports, airports, air traffic, etc. Try to deliver your goods or take delivery.
You can argue, albeit not convincingly, that we should just let people starve in the name of fiscal responsibility, but that attitude only works if we’re talking about [b]you[/b] and not about “them”.
In the words of an old Motown song, “Everybody’s somebody’s baby.”
You and I have never met, and so frankly I don’t care if you live or die. It means nothing to me. Your family may have a different opinion on the matter, as they may well about my own survival. So whose needs do we cease to address??
You’re right, b&b, time marches on. We, too, bought readers (iPads) a couple of years ago and I’d never go back. The convenience of downloading books from Amazon, the iBookStore or wherever, especially to us here in Costa Rica, trumps anything a printed book could offer.
Interesting sidenote: In a recently rebroadcast of an early episode of Startrek, the Next Generation, Captain Picard was reading LaForge’s engineering update on a tablet.
sprite:
1. There’s no question that the benefits of the past three economic recoveries have gone primarily to the top one percent. Those recoveries include the one in the second Reagan term, the one during Clinton’s term, and the current one. That does not mean, however, that there has been no recovery. Millions of new private sector jobs have been created. The stock markets are at all-time highs. If the current recovery, however slow, isn’t a real recovery than neither were the two previous, and we must have been mired in the economy of the early 1980s (which isn’t so) ever since.
2. Please explain just what the U.S. government is currently in default of. What is it not paying?
3. Some folks have always sought to migrate. We are among them. And maybe there are more and more joining us, but the net change due to emigration/immigration is definitely a positive number for the U.S. Far more are traveling in than out.
Remember that while more Americans may be leaving than ever, stated in absolute numbers, there are also more Americans. One one-thousandth of one percent (or whatever) becomes an ever-larger number the more Americans there are. The denominator is critical to the analysis.
4. The Federal Reserve is hardly the only factor in the weakening status of the Social Security Trust Fund. Had the absurdly wealthy not been given yet another advantage years ago, the Trust Fund would be in much better shape than it is today, after decades of mismanagement. Worse, there’s still time for the crooks in Washington to resolve matters.
Please don’t vote. The sky is due to fall on election day and you don’t want to be caught outside.
