GAO: Statehood Too Costly for Either Puerto Rico or the U.S.

Puerto Rican statehood may be a good idea, but its time has not come.

by Rod D. Martin
April 2, 2014

I could be extremely pro-Puerto Rican statehood.  The U.S. Constitution was the original EU, after all, minus all the statist bureaucratic blather.  All of our states are countries:  that's what "state" means; and aside from the original 13, several more joined the union very much as one joins the European Union, from Vermont to Texas to the "Bear Republic" in California to Hawaii.  All of those except the first came multi-lingual and with mixed ethnicity.  They all worked out just fine.

But I'm not pro-statehood, at least not for now, for the same reasons I wasn't back in 1998.  Since then, the whole world got a miniature lesson on this during the Great Recession:  the Southern European PIGS (plus Cyprus) collapsed or nearly collapsed because they were too poor to enter a currency union with the more dynamic powers of Northern Europe, with tragic consequences for the South and a costly nightmare for the North.

Puerto Rico would be the American Greece (and n…