Understanding the current crisis in Puerto Rico

For the past 118 years, Puerto Rico has existed as an anamoly, geographically closer than Hawaii or Alaska to mainland United States, yet ruled like distant Guam or American Samoa. In keeping with America’s somewhat self-deceiving anticolonialist ethos, the island was deemed a “possession” during World War I. For most Americans, the island is known best for the 20th-century migration of Puerto Rican families to the mainland, mostly to New York City, a byproduct of the deal that extended the draft to the island’s young men. Now, the migration has begun anew, again to New York but also to Florida, Chicago, and the American southeast. Driven by an economy in free fall, more than 50,000 people have been leaving for the mainland each year, and disproportionately represented in those numbers are the most ambitious, educated, and employable Puerto Ricans.

This is the context of Puerto Rico’s current fiscal crisis. Its $73 billion government debt is many times worse than any U.S. state’s burden in per capita terms, including the reigning champion of U.S. state-level fiscal dysfunction, Illinois. San Juan cannot raise enough tax money locally to pay — or even service — that debt and wields only partial control over the economy: While it can cut government spending, trim the public sector, and pass laws to make the island more attractive to establish businesses locally, the big decisions lie in Washington. Because Puerto Rico does not have its own currency, it cannot devalue its way out of debt. It is tethered to a much larger entity that, even in the worst of times, wonders whether the failure of a small Caribbean possession is really worth its time.

Many in Congress treat the island’s plight like a mere annoyance — or, at best, yet another way to highlight all that is wrong with the other party’s approach to government. Yet Congress has jealously, even imperiously, guarded its control of some of the basic realities of the island’s economic and political life, insisting that the United States can tap it for soldiers when needed, for instance, and refuse to extend the right to vote in U.S. elections or even congressional matters.

Learn more by reading the rest at The Plot Against Puerto Rico