Why is Puerto Rico in the Crapper After the Hurricane?

First, let me admit that I've never been to the isle in my life.  I have worked around five or six Puerto Rican folks while in the military and did have various conversations with them over this strange and mysterious island (ask a hundred folks, and you tend to find only about one-percent who've been to the island), and most Americans still think it's an independent country.

All this electrical trouble since the hurricane?  Well....if you go back through business news over the past couple of years....their national company has had some issues and had their bonds judged to be near junk-status.  If you bring up maintenance and upgrades?  Well....it's a marginal amount of work and you get the impression that they are surviving with a two-star program providing electricity to the country.  Stateside electrical companies willing to come in and help?  You'd have to arrange ships to bring the trucks and personnel....then agree that you'd likely never get any financial pay-back from the national electrical organization.

Then you come to the island's own junk bonds.  Yeah....they've been junk-status for more than a year or two.

I asked one work-associate back in the 1980s about the lifestyle of the island, and his emphasis was....just about everything on the island is connected to corruption.  The cops, the legal system, the drug-scene, etc.  In his explanation of things....there's two economies working in Puerto Rico.  One is legit and paying taxes....one is strictly non-legit and avoiding taxes.  You'd really have to screw up badly to be caught and face punishment....that was his opinion.

The unemployment rate of Puerto Rico?  For the past year.....roughly ten-percent.  But here's the nifty part of this story.  The rate has been dismal for over a decade.  If you had any skills or college education, you left the island.  Back around 2000, they had near 3.8-million people on the island.  Every year....thousands have left, so they don't count toward the current 10-percent unemployment situation.  Right now, they sit at 3.4-million.  If you follow what's been said over the past week, I'd take a guess that at least 150,000 will leave Puerto Rico by Christmas and likely never come back.  By spring of 2018, add another 150,000 onto that.  They will likely shrink below 3.0-million by July of 2018.   The best and brightest?  Yes, they will be the ones gone.

If you were an American company looking for a potential industrial site there....why?  Maybe cheap labor but it'll hard to find competent or highly educated people for the operation.

For Trump, the best solution here would be to activate 5,000 Guardsmen for six months of duty to help put the grid back back into operation and clear roads.  Then you might go and offer some tax incentive package for some manufacturing companies to come in and set up shop for ten years.  But beyond that....the corruption factor remains.  And I doubt that this will ever correct itself.