Puerto Rico

Wrong Mayor. False Report.

The answer appears to be an emphatic "no."

During a televised hearing before the Homeland Security Committee last week on natural disasters in 2017, Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama made a joke that thousands of people online perceived as a racist jab.

Thousands upon thousands of Puerto Ricans have landed in Florida in the months since Hurricane Maria battered their island. They have simple priorities, but complicated needs.

Hurricanes Irma and Maria strafed much of the island of Puerto Rico and worsened what was already a perilous fiscal problem facing the island’s government. However, a reconstruction program that has finally kicked into high gear helped its surprisingly robust economy bounce back, and the employment…

Wawa Shabbawa? Yep, that's what it sounds like: Shabbat at a Wawa. A local performance artist, Brian Feldman, came up with the concept. Turns out nobody really went because they're obsessed with Wawa, like Feldman is. Now, a Shabbat at a Sheetz? That's another matter entirely. They'd probably have…

News broke Monday that the FBI is investigating what appears to be a suspect deal between Puerto Rico’s state-owned power company, Prepa, and a small Montana-based company called Whitefish Energy Holdings LLC. Under the terms of the $300 million contract, Whitefish was to assist in the rebuilding…

More bad news for congressional Republicans coming out of the White House Tuesday: Politico reports that Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff is whipping up donors to “purge” GOP lawmakers who don’t rally behind the president’s legislative agenda.

As Puerto Rico still reels in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the mayor of San Juan has found herself the latest target of President Trump’s Twitter feed. It began on Friday when Carmen Yulin Cruz, the mayor of Puerto Rico’s capital and largest city, criticized the self-congratulatory tone the…

Space comes to Wisconsin. I'm a huge fan of the website Atlas Obscura. Every neat place I've wanted to visit (especially abandoned things) is on there, and many places I've visited have been because of their site. Part of my bucket list is derived from there, too. Their newsletter is a welcome…

Is Jared Kushner trolling us? News reports are out saying that Jared Kushner is registered to vote in New York... as a female. Left-leaning groups are pointing to this as an example of Kushner's incompetence (and to be fair he did repeatedly make flubs on forms needed to serve as a top adviser to…

A question no one’s asked out loud with regard to the ongoing Illinois state budget negotiations is what happens if—or when—the state becomes unable or unwilling to pay its bills a few years down the road.

It is official: Puerto Rico has entered into the "Title III" bankruptcy that many feared would be the ultimate outcome of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act passed by Congress last summer. This includes the island's largest public pension plan, the Employee Retirement…

The process of debt restructuring in Puerto Rico has been, if nothing else, an alarming case study in conflicts of interest, cronyism, and putting politics ahead of doing the right thing. As the island struggles to regain its financial footing under the heavy burden of unfunded liabilities and…

The Puerto Rico Fiscal Oversight Board is on a tight deadline to draft a recovery plan that will put the island back on its financial feet, avoid further defaults, and pave the way for a sustainable economic future. The Board is currently slated to unveil its Fiscal and Economic Growth Plan (FEGP)…

Florida senator Marco Rubio introduced a bill on Tuesday that aims to help Puerto Rico's struggling economy with a "wage enhancement" plan.

In the months since the passage of PROMESA and the implementation of Congress' Federal Oversight Board, Puerto Rico's woefully underfunded pension systems have taken center stage in discussions concerning the island's fiscal reform. While there is no disputing that the Commonwealth's pension plans…

It is common knowledge that Puerto Rico is a financial mess and that it arrived at its current predicament due to its government's unwillingness to make difficult decisions. Ex-Governor Luis Fortuno made an attempt to return the island's finances to sanity, but his efforts cost him his reelection…

I was an ardent critic of the "PROMESA" legislation Congress passed this summer to help restructure Puerto Rico's debt for one primary reason: It was clear hat it would serve as a blueprint for the states that have overburdened pension funds to escape their own debts by shortchanging the…

When my wife and I bought our condo we also wanted an amazing, new mattress so we got memory foam. It's a terrific mattress, but a little bit expensive. So we put it on our credit card.

Congress has a terrible time with deadlines. It's not that it's unable to meet real deadlines. Just the opposite, in fact: If it absolutely has to pass legislation by a given day it invariably figures out a way to get it done, no matter who is in charge. The trick is convincing everyone that there…

Following the reintroduction of the Puerto Rico debt legislation this week, it appears that the battle over how to restructure the insolvent island may soon be headed for a Congressional vote. The basic problems with previous approaches to fixing what ails the island have been papered over, to be…

Everyone is in agreement that the federal government needs to address Puerto Rico's insolvency sooner rather than later. What that would entail is where the consensus breaks down.

For those who haven’t been paying attention, Puerto Rico is in serious financial trouble. It has accumulated more than $70 billion of debt, driven by reckless spending and short-sighted borrowing, that has left the commonwealth's public corporations and utilities virtually insolvent. To make…

Puerto Rico is an economic basket case. It’s been in a recession for nearly a decade, its skilled labor is leaving the island in droves, and the island’s government recently told its bondholders that it is unable to fully repay them. To emphasize that point, it recently failed to meet some bond…

Hillary Clinton will be going to Puerto Rico later this week to discuss the "health care crisis." The Clinton campaign announced the visit in a press release this morning.

One reads of the crisis in Greece.   And the one much closer to home in Puerto Rico.  The crisis, that is, that inevitably comes after spending too much and taking on more debt than it is possible even to service, much less pay down. One thinks of how unfortunate it is for the people who will now…

Puerto Rico is in a financial bind. The Commonwealth, along with its public utilities and various municipalities, collectively owes more than it can realistically repay.

Oxon Hill, Md.

Mitt Romney went to Puerto Rico on Friday to make a pitch to voters there. Byron York reports on how the Republican presidential candidate played it: