Puerto Rico: Let Them Eat Debt!
NO ONE HAS A CLUE WHAT TO DO ABOUT PUERTO RICO.
Can we just stop fucking around and admit it already? Puerto Rico was in an economic crisis before Hurricane Maria, and now it's confronting a humanitarian catastrophe. Before the storm, PR owed $70 billion to Wall Street and $50 billion to its own citizens. Three weeks after the storm, PR is facing massive food shortages, 8% of its roads are passable, and only 16% of Puerto Ricans have power. Republicans have the #HottestTake, of course. Let's lend Puerto Rico some more money! That will totally work!
Paul Ryan, that "limpdick motherfucker born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation," is taking a field trip to PR on Friday to figure out which tools from his bag of market-based magic tricks will produce hundreds of thousands of meals a day out of thin air. Luckily, he's taking Cathy McMorris Rodgers, so she can comfort them as a mother who appreciates thatall life is sacred . The rest of you whiners can bootstrap yourselves out of this mess, but Puerto Rican fetuses -- she is THERE for you!
The problem for Republicans is that Puerto Rico proves that every single piece of GOP orthodoxy is utter bullshit. Small government can't rebuild the electrical grid for 3 million people. Cutting taxes will not put food in Puerto Rican grocery stores. And the free market is how Puerto Rico got $70 billion of bond debt in the first place.
A real free-market economist would say, "Well, we clearly intend to cook the planet with carbon emissions, so Puerto Rico is facing an eternity of supercharged storms. We just have to evacuate most of the population to the continental U.S." But that would require Republicans to acknowledge man-made climate change and allow all those brown-skinned Democrats to turn Florida blue (and Spanish-speaking). Which is right out .
So Republicans have gone to Plan B.
For some reason we are having a briefing on Puerto Rico and the press and public are not allowed in. #hasc pic.twitter.com/y7l3WvOAzq
— Ruben Gallego (@RubenGallego) October 11, 2017
I get that anti-intellect streak too. Small town hick school, and I moved in from the big city of KCMO, so on top of being smarter than everyone else, I wasn't from around there. So many abusive nicknames, so much ostracization, so much social stigma.In fact, they were so behind I their curriculum, that when I moved in from KC, they were just starting what I'd already done a semester ago. So yeah, I got screwed from every direction when it came to perusing higher educational opportunities.
There's a per capita thing that makes PR's debt proportionally bigger...