President Boric needs to be more like LBJ
Although he is trying to understand the country he runs
Gabriel Boric is the President of Chile. His rise was spectacular and indicates a fine political mind. But since his inauguration, he just hasn’t shown himself to be very good at his job.
Boric became President because of his role in the 2019 riots. Boric shared my 2019 diagnosis of Chile’s problem: taxes are too low. They’re too low in terms of generating cash to redistribute, and they’re too low in terms of getting the society to feel that the rich are shouldering their fair part of the burden.
President Boric was elected to change that. On July 7th, 2022, he submitted a tax reform bill to Congress. (Under the current constitution, only the President can submit tax proposals.) It was a big bill! It would net an additional 4% of GDP in tax revenues. Here’s how:
A new top rate of 43% would kick in at US$107,000 per year—the top marginal rate of 40% currently kicks in at an income of US$237,000;
The ability to avoid taxes on income from two rental properties would go away;
The ability to deduct interest on more than one mortgage would go away;
The capital gains tax would go from nothing to 22%;
A new wealth tax of 1.0% would kick in on assets over US$4.9 million and rise to 1.8% on assets over US$14.7 million;
Reading it, I’m surprised that the bill would raise only 4% of GDP! But it would go a long way to making the system seem fair. 75% of Chilean households would remain exempt from income taxes (they kick in at annual income of US$10,300, which gives you an idea of how poor Chileans are) and only 6,300 households would be subject to the wealth tax.
Only he couldn’t get it passed.
And he couldn’t get it passed for stupid reasons. Lyndon Johnson would be appalled. And President Boric had all sorts of advantages that LBJ did not.
Short version: the bill had to start in the lower house. Article 66 says that bills need a majority of all present to pass. The lower house has 155 seats. Four deputies didn’t show up to vote. So the bill needed 76 votes to pass.
It got 73, with three abstentions, and thereby failed. This was kind of ridiculous. First, if the abstainers had simply stayed home, then the bill would have passed. Boric couldn’t arrange this.
Second, why were four people absent? Two of the three abstainers were on the political right. The third, Andrés Jouannet, is a radical centrist who worked for (socialist) President Bachelet. He represents Araucanía and he is a leader of the angrily moderate Yellow Movement (discussed here). He was raked over the coals in a TV interview after his abtsention and there was this telling moment:
Jouannet: “Let’s talk about the underlying issue, which is public safety…”
Interviewer: “We’re talking about a tax reform intended to finance social programs that I imagine you approve of, since you’re from the center-left. Looking past the fact that you legitimately put Araucanía first, don’t you agree with a reform that will pay for pensions?”
Jouannet: “A lot of other votes were absent. I represent Araucanía and we’re sick of the President coming along and saying that there is going to be a peace commission, but that’s nothing new.”
Interviewer: “That’s not about tax reform.”
Jouannet: “How is it not?”
Interviewer: “Well, okay, then why refuse to discuss it?”
Jouannet: “Why didn’t they discuss it with me?”
Interviewer: “That’s personalism, Congressman!”
Jouannet: “I represent my region, not myself.”
Interviewer: “You are a Deputy of the Republic.”
Jouannet: “So I’m supposed to approve everything? I can’t put my region first?”
Exactly. The government could have gotten Jouannet’s vote. It would have needed to negotiate and throw some bones. And those might have been difficult bones, since the “public safety” issue that Jouannet refers to is continuing violence on the part of the Mapuche—a subject that Boric would prefer not to touch with a 10-foot-pole lest he violate progressive sensibilities.
But getting Jouannet’s vote was a solvable problem! Jimmy Carter solved far harder ones when he got the Panama Canal Treaty through the Senate. When you’re looking bad compared to Jimmy Carter then you got a problem …
It’s not just Jouannet. Consider three of the four members who simply didn’t bother to show up. They are all on the left! Mónica Arce got her chops as a member of Boric’s own Humanist Party. Viviana Delgado is a Green. (And yes, the Chilean Greens are a genuine green party, not at all like their strange Mexican counterpart.) So is Pamela Jiles.
The Boric administration is livid that the trio stabbed it in the back on tax reform. But at the end of the day, it was up to the Boric administration to go down to Valparaíso (where Congress sits, pictured below) and get the votes.

And what about some of the “no” votes? The Democrats are a breakaway faction from the Christian Democrats; they could have been brought on board. Gaspar Rivas abstained, and he’s pretty right-wing, but he shows all sorts of weird lefty sympathies on economic issues. Maybe he could have been slid to “yes'“?1
With Congress closely divided it was always going to be a stretch. But Boric wasted time on the constitutional convention. He also scored a bunch of own-goals on migration, on pardoning rioters, on picking fights with the Israeli ambassador.
What President Boric needs to do, I think, is learn the dark art of rolling logs. Chile is a test case of Lee Drutman’s case for breaking the two-party system. Its Congress uses proportional representation from subnational regions. Parties are still relatively strong, not the free-for-all of Peru or Brazil. If Drutman is correct, then Boric can still pull this out, do the work, get the votes, and reform Chile in the direction he wants. He might even reduce polarization in the process.
Alternatively, well, Jimmy Carter made an excellent former president.
If I had any reason to believe that Boric was responsible for Rivas’s abstention, then I’d give him a lot of credit. But I haven’t seen any evidence of that.