COUNTRY NOTES: Here Comes the Window Tax

By Nicholas Asheshov
Special to the Andean Air Mail & PERUVIAN TIMES

I have a suggestion for Mr. Castilla, the young Finance Minister, which will help him iron out what he calls disruptions in the economic agenda.  It happens to us all.

My idea is that he create a new tax which will have the merit of aggravating, but not much, the better-off, and pleasing socialists, making it an out-of-the-gate winner.

My proposal is for a tax on windows. If, like some of my neighbours here in Urubamba, your house has just a few small ones or, high in the cordillera, no windows at all, you pay nothing.  If your house in the jungle is all palm-thatch roof, it’s the same. no tax.

For Peru today, the window tax is “Brilliant!,” says Richard Webb,  the country’s top economist.

“A window tax would be a thousand times easier to collect than the present property tax.  No complex calculations.” Read more…

Op-Ed: Observations on the Election Results

“The coming years will for sure compound this as the voting tsunami lines the pockets of a few, but salts the wells of families all over Peru.”

 

By Nicholas Asheshov

Here are some immediate technical observations on the knife-edge victory of Ollanta Humala.

• Keiko Fujimori’s people fatally misjudged the final two or three weeks of an inordinately long campaign. The polls show well enough that if the election had been in mid-May, Keiko would have been first past the post. Keiko’s kitchen cabinet, led by Jaime Yoshiyama, a first-class minister in her fathers first administration (1990-92), were so self-confident that they refused to broaden out and form a coalition. They thought they could go it alone.As President Garcia told associates: “They’re close, much too close,” — son muy cerrados. Read more…

Country Notes: Why Easter is so late this year

By Nicholas Asheshov

Every afternoon this week, including Monday – which in Cuzco was the Day of Our Lord of Earthquakes – thunder has battered the steep sides of the Urubamba Valley.  This is very unusual.  Normally thunderstorms announce only the beginning of the rains in October and November.  Normally the rains end in Urubamba like clockwork between March 23 and the 28th.

Not this year and I consulted Kim Malville, professor of Astrophysics at the University of Colorado and a leading authority on ancient Andean astronomy, which I’ve always thought of as the Weather Channel for the Incas, Moches and the rest.  I wanted to know why Easter is so late this year and what effect this is having on our weather. Read more…

Fujimori, Arana, massacres, impunity and immunity

By Paul Goulder ~

In April ex-President Fujimori was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison and the long fight for justice by relatives of those killed at Cantuta and Barrios Altos, and who had absolutely no connection with terrorism, have seen some belated and grim reward. It has been called “un hito jurídico mundial[i]” (an international legal milestone). Read more…

Peru as the next domino in Chavez’s oily socialist plot: How the Wall Street Journal blew the story

By Rick Vecchio ~

The decision last week by the European Parliament to reject inclusion of Peru’s Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement on its list of known terrorist groups has reverberated through Peru with hardly any notice taken by English language news media — with one very notable exception: The Wall Street Journal. And boy, did they botch it.

The column titled “Friends of Terror” by WSJ America’s columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady was at best misinformed, if for nothing else, because the very first sentence in her lead was erroneous. The European Parliament did not remove the MRTA from its terrorist list. The MRTA wasn’t on the list. Read more…