April 18, 2016
If you want to see welfare-state socialism in action, go to bankrupt Puerto Rico. Let’s hope Bernie Sanders’ voters are paying attention to what their worker paradise dreams turn into in real life.
Puerto Rico is a financial basket base with the island’s $75 billion debt now eclipsing 100% of its output. The government is already in technical default, and San Juan says it may not be able to make its next $422 million payment on May 1 and then another $2 billion payment that comes due this summer.
House Republicans are trying to rescue Puerto Rico from calamity. It is a territory of the United States and as such should not be abandoned by the feds — even though Puerto Rico is mostly a victim of its own financial and fiscal negligence and overspending.
A House bill would create a financial control board to take charge of Puerto Rico’s finances and budget affairs. This a de facto bankruptcy for Puerto Rico. Such a model helped the District of Columbia recover when it was in a similar financial crisis. A control board also worked well in managing Detroit’s bankruptcy. The financial control board is NOT a cash taxpayer bailout of Puerto Rico, which is what the PR government wants, as do many Democrats in Congress’s.
Read the full article at The New York Sun: Sanders’ Workers’ Paradise Faces Moment of Truth In Collapse of Puerto Rico