I’m all for making Puerto Rico the 51st state, but as we’ve talked about here on several occasions, their $73 billion dollars of debt that have bankrupted that very small United States territory of only 3 million people was a major problem before Hurricane Maria destroyed the island as a catastrophic category 4 storm.  It was the third major hurricane to hit the United States just in 2017.  Previously all of Florida had been hit by a major storm, and before that Texas.  Trump dealt with both of those crises so well that the hungry media looking for criticism had nothing to say in both cases, even though the personal damage was in many cases much more extensive in dollar value. But when Puerto Rico happened something was very different.  The reason for the mountainous debt, and the cause of so much devastation was that the island was ran by Democrats and they were ill prepared for the disaster—as they always are.  Trump’s FEMA supplies came to the San Juan docks but there was nobody there to take the supplies inland causing the media to criticize the federal efforts.  But behind their criticisms were something else, a fear they wished to hide from the public about the politics of the situation and it is quite telling to explore the cause of that fear.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/investing/puerto-rico-debt-who-owns-trump/index.html

I’ve done hurricane relief before.  I remember very well how bad Hurricane Fran was when it hit Chapel Hill, North Carolina as a category 3 storm an hour inland from the coast.  The power was knocked out for two weeks and I was one of the guys there pulling trees off the homes and it was a real struggle just working in that environment let alone being a resident living in the heavy humidity trying to get insurance adjusters to come and give them back some normalcy to their lives.  The National Guard had to clear the highways so that those insurance adjusters could even get to town, and then the wait was extreme as everyone had something to put on a claim.  You learn really quick all the things we normally take for granted like running water, air conditioning, refrigeration—and an open and well stocked grocery story.   Maybe one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in my life was a grocery superstore completely empty because everyone had ransacked it and it hadn’t been restocked for weeks because delivery trucks couldn’t get to it.   And this was in a very conservative area where people were pretty smart, generally, and there weren’t a lot of people living off the federal government.  Many of the people I was dealing with lived in nice homes and had good jobs at either NCU or Duke University across town—so at least there was money as a foundation to all the misery.  It was a mess, and that was the United States mainland where military bases and a very advanced highway structure were there to provide the quickest relief possible.

Of course Puerto Rico is a different story, it’s an island to the southeast of Cuba so it’s not connected to the United States mainland in any way, nor is it even close. It’s nearly as remote as a territory as Hawaii or Guam is.  Getting to Puerto Rico isn’t easy under the most optimal conditions, let alone when all the infrastructure was wiped away by a major hurricane that touched 100% of the island.   Being so far in debt the power grid was in a poor state to begin with and the people living there had very little money.  Most of their homes were disgraceful places just a few steps out of a third world country.  The Democrat governor, Ricardo Antonio Rosselló Nevares is a member of the New Progressive Party—which is just another name for Communist Party USA and points directly to why Puerto Rico had a debt problem to begin with.  The Governor seems like a pretty decent human being, but his politics are horrendously misguided—so he wasn’t prepared for a storm that completely destroyed the island leaving the 3 million residence completely vulnerable.  Then to make matters worse the mayor of San Juan, where the major port is located to get supplies to people inland was ran by Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto—an even bigger liberal than the governor.  Between them they had no plan of action or understanding of basic management skills which left them to not only ask for federal help by way of supplies like FEMA had conducted in Florida and Texas recently.  But they were asking for the infrastructure to deliver them as well—a considerably more difficult proposal given the remoteness of Puerto Rico.

With Texas and Florida being Republican lead states with governors who knew what they were doing federal help was able to bring in supplies and from there plenty of self-sufficient volunteers used their monster trucks and fishing boats to get those supplies to the people who needed them until the basic necessities of life could be somewhat resumed.  It will take many years to even hope to return to normalcy, but few people died and the people in those regions got back on their feet quickly.  They were success stories defying the tragedy due to the inherit self-reliance of the people most affected.  The people in those places were conservative minded which is how Republican governors were elected in those states to begin with.  Not so in Puerto Rico where I think the only Republican on the island will be President Trump when he visits to examine the extensive damage for himself.  In Puerto Rico the people who elected the progressive Democrats into office think much differently than those people in Texas and Florida.  They had no boats or monster trucks to help with the volunteer effort.  They were mostly poor people made worse by their addiction to government services and socialist local management of resources.  The people there didn’t rally to solve their problem, they sat on their porches waiting for someone to turn their power back on, and to bring them food and water.  The supplies were in the port at San Juan to distribute inland, but there was no effort to take those supplies to the people who needed them because nobody thought to do it for themselves—hence their tendency to vote for Democrats in office and to be poor, and in perpetual debt.

And that’s why the Democrats around the country are attacking Trump so viciously, because they have to hide the big difference in why Puerto Rico is so dissimilar from the major disasters that crippled Texas and Florida just weeks before.  Everyone can tell for themselves how differently the Puerto Ricans reacted to a major tragedy compared to the bass boats and monster trucks in Houston who fought bravely to restore order to their communities.  Liberals know what the problem is and they can’t let that become the story so they are attacking the Trump administration for essentially the same things they attacked President Bush for after Katrina wiped out New Orleans. But the problem was never the reaction of the Republican presidents; it was the type of people who were inflicted.  In Republican run states where the political bases were much more self-reliant the federal government and the people worked well together to manage the crises.  But in Democrat lead areas where liberal mayors and governors were in charge, everything was a disaster.  The FEMA people could bring the supplies, but the locals expected those supplies to literally be poured down their mouths because intellectually they are a too depended on government services to think for themselves.  That’s generally why they were poor to begin with.  Being poor isn’t just something that happens, it reflects the way people manage their lives.  Hard working people tend to have jobs and therefore money to work with.  They may even have a nice bass boat in their driveway to use if they find themselves flooded out. But poor people are usually those who are apathetic and always looking to do the minimum in life—which is why they don’t have many resources to work with when something bad happens. Puerto Rico had a lot of poor people by its demographic nature which is why they’re in terrible debt to begin with.

Trump’s tough talk about Puerto Rico is perfectly justified.  The federal government can’t just come along and bail them out of the $73 billion dollars in debt then pay for the complete rebuilding of the entire island.  The people there are going to have to change fundamentally into a more conservative base of philosophy otherwise they’ll be in trouble again during the next crises and they won’t bring anything to the table as an American state. The way to get Puerto Rico back on its feet is to create some free enterprise zones to make the island attractive to some of the high-tech businesses that are emerging in the new Trump economy—so that the place can become something like a new Silicone Valley.  But the nature of the people must change because even if Trump brings jobs back to Puerto Rico someone has to actually deliver on the effort.  They can’t sit in the port at San Juan and wait for someone to unload them.  Puerto Ricans need to learn from these crises and change their ways.  They must learn to help themselves—and to stop electing Democrats to run things so that prosperity can actually take root.  Democrats hope that nobody notices their failures in Puerto Rico and that they can hide their mistakes behind the other storms of the year and build a case that racism is somehow the problem.  But it’s not, the biggest difference is that Democrats are idiots who don’t understand basic economics and when pressed in life they always buckle—because their basic foundations of thought doesn’t prepare them for reality–leaving them always in need of a subsidy to fuel their political thoughts which have foundations of moral bankruptcy.  They only know how to just consume the resources thrown in their direction under every circumstance.  The problems in Puerto Rico are and have always been the failure of Democrats—and for that they can only blame themselves.

Rich Hoffman

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