For too long, government elites in our country have gambled with taxpayers’ money, spending and borrowing with reckless abandon. This is evident in our $19 trillion debt and in the downgrade of Chicago’s bonds to near junk status. But nowhere have decades of failed liberal fiscal policy come home to roost more urgently than in Puerto Rico.

America’s little island territory, once considered our “jewel in the Caribbean,” is now an impoverished social welfare state grappling with $72 billion in debt. It got there the same way so many other fiscally undisciplined states, cities and countries have done the same: through years of unbalanced budgeting, suicidal spending and an addiction to borrowing money that it never really intended to repay.