A majority of Puerto Ricans have voted for statehood.
I say NFW. Instead, I
think it’s time to give Puerto Rico its independence.
There. Goodbye. Good
luck. Don’t let the door hit you on the
butt.
We don’t need Puerto Rico.
It has no strategic value to us. It consumes far more of our
resources than it ever gives back.
It’s not even that nice of a place to visit. Wasn’t even
before the hurricanes. We vacationed near San Juan for a week some years ago.
The resort was beautiful but the staff warned us not to rent a car and go off
exploring on our own – it was too dangerous.
That was good advice.
The crime rate there is routinely about 50% higher than in the U.S. as a
whole. I’m not making that up; that’s
according to FBI stats.
It has a high poverty rate – upwards of 46% of its people
lived below the poverty line in 2015; that’s long before the latest hurricanes.
It’s shown zero fiscal responsibility; it piled on debt to where it needs a $70
billion bailout. It allowed its
infrastructure to collapse well before the hurricanes by continuously shifting
dollars away to fund more government benefits.
Puerto Ricans right now are American citizens. They can vote
in Federal elections, but they don’t have any elected U.S. Representatives or
Senators in Congress like our states.
That leads Puerto Rico to constantly bitch that it suffers
under taxation without representation. As
American citizens they do pay the same Federal taxes we do, right? Sort of.
They don’t pay any Federal income tax on income derived inside Puerto
Rico, unlike every state in the U.S. But
they do pay into Social Security and Medicare; that is if they have taxable income, which a large percentage don't because they are unemployed or have been deemed disabled.
Meanwhile, inflation there is in the double digits.
Puerto Ricans are subject to a national sales tax on 11%,
yet its government still can’t afford to keep the lights on. My bet is nobody there,
except for tourists, is likely paying that tax.
Even the big corporations there – like big pharma, mostly lured by generous
tax treatment from the U.S. to help its economy – don’t contribute much.
Despite all the special breaks and incentives given to Puerto Rico by Congress
over the decades, it’s still a basket case.
It’s our own little banana republic. Fraud and corruption are rampant.
About a third of the population is on food stamps, with few
if any restrictions on who qualifies. Not all that long ago the Feds uncovered
a $30 million racket there where people were trading their stamps for cash. Other vendors have been found to be falsifying
receipts and sales records to cover for allowing recipients to use food stamps
to buy things like liquor and cigarettes.
Before the hurricanes nine of the top 10 zip codes receiving
Social Security Disability Income (SSDI) were in Puerto Rico. Initial SSDI claims there were approved 63%
of the time, compared to about 30% here in the states. Is that because so many more Puerto Ricans were
truly disabled? Come on.
Given numbers like that, is it any wonder why Trump and
others distrust the casualty counts from Puerto Rico? Think about it: how do deaths from the
hurricanes on the island rise from 64 to almost 3,000 after a few months? Do we
trust ordinary Puerto Ricans not to overstate what happened? Do we think they
wouldn’t cook the books on this as well to get more?
This is the same place where the mayor of San Juan
went on TV and chastised Trump and FEMA for not sending any supplies in the
hurricanes’ aftermath. Puerto Ricans
were starving, without power, and without clean water. And FEMA and Trump were doing nothing to
help.
She did this in a brightly lit warehouse standing in front
of row after row of pallets of bottled water and other supplies sent by – guess
who – Trump and FEMA. Huh?
We should blame our own politicians for some of the institutional problems in Puerto Rico. Democrats in particular have routinely fought against demanding more fiscal responsibility by the people running Puerto Rico. They see nothing wrong there.
As a result, we’ve allowed Puerto Rico to devolve into a virtual socialist
state largely dependent on government largesse – from us – to support an entrenched
bureaucracy of political cronies.
But Puerto Rico takes it to a new level that would make even Rahm Emanuel blush.
About 7% of adult Americans work for Federal, state or local
governments. In Puerto Rico it’s 21%. Some
years back, Puerto Rico’s government changed pension rules for its employees to
give them 75% of their three highest salaries when they retired; not
surprisingly, government workers near retirement got rapid promotions with wage
increases. That cost billions, to the point that its public pension fund is so
underfunded that U.S. taxpayers will probably have to fork over a billion
dollars a year for decades just to meet its current pension commitments.
How did it get in such a mess? A big reason was buying votes
with perks and weird benefits, like mandatory Christmas bonuses and free electricity
to all 78 of its municipalities, and the pension giveaways. It had to float bonds
it could never pay back to finance all that.
Puerto Rico being part of the U.S. has always been far more
beneficial for its citizens than it could ever be for us – they can come here
and live as U.S. citizens, they get benefits we pay for, we bail them out of
every catastrophe and self-inflicted wound.
What do we get in return? Nothing but bitching and moaning. And
demands for more.
A perfect case is its reaction to the recent hurricanes.
Certainly, the island was devastated.
But a major reason was because it was a crap hole before the hurricanes
hit. When you live in a shack it’s going to get blown away in a hurricane. When
you let corrupt building inspectors nod and wink at substandard construction,
those buildings are going to get wiped out, too.
Now it wants us to rebuild the island. No, actually it wants
us to spend billions on restoring a Puerto Rico that didn’t exist before the
hurricanes. It wants us to fix things it never did. It wants us to provide new things it couldn’t
be bothered with for decades. Its
demands for more money are not entirely because of the hurricanes, but largely
because it was already broke from prior corruption and gross mismanagement not
related to any storm.
When a power grid hasn’t been updated since the 1950s and
is run by political hacks enriching themselves rather than making necessary
improvements, the result is predictable. Even before the latest hurricanes power on
the island was spotty at best with frequent outages and brownouts; but a big storm
comes along and suddenly it’s time for the U.S. to finance construction of a brand-new power grid.
Honestly, when power was restored to 90% of the island, that
was probably more than existed before the hurricanes. Geraldo Rivera – always proud of his Puerto
Rican heritage – recently said that in years past (well before the latest
hurricanes) when he would visit his relatives there, it wasn’t unusual for 70%
of the island to be without power.
Now some will think I’m kicking Puerto Rico while it’s down.
I feel sorry for its people. But only to a point. They are the same people, like big-city and deep-blue-state Democrats here, who kept electing politicians who bought their votes with
promises they could never keep and giveaways they couldn’t pay for.
They voted to get stuff they wanted now, damn the future
consequences.
Guess what. It didn’t work out. It almost never does. Just as it doesn't here.
I’m not saying we should abandon Puerto Rico
immediately. Its people – not its
government – need our assistance. We
should help the people with humanitarian aid.
But once we have it somewhat stabilized, we should cut our losses and
get out. And somewhat stabilized doesn’t
mean perfect, or making Puerto Rico much better than it was before.
In its present state, it’s a bottomless money pit, much like
Afghanistan and Iraq. Like those, any billions given to its government by us to
“rebuild” Puerto Rico will only line the pockets of local politicians and their
pals. If they get their hands on our money, it will disappear as fast as those
3,000 people who supposedly died in the hurricanes. We should skip its government
altogether.
Then, if Puerto Ricans already living stateside and in our
military want to stay U.S. citizens, they can.
But give the island full independence to succeed or fail on its own. Maybe
then the people of Puerto Rico will finally step up to take full responsibility
for their own futures.
Finally, by all means, never allow Puerto Rico to become a
state.
Never. Despite pleas
from Democrats. Or Puerto Ricans.
Democrats only want statehood for the island because it
typically votes for Democrats. Democrats want it to get Senators and U.S.
Representatives in Congress who will also reliably toe the Democrat line, and
more Democrat electors in the Electoral College.
Puerto Ricans want statehood to get more from us, plain and
simple.
Enough is enough.
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