According to certain Americans and members of the IMF, the streets of Puerto Rico are crowded with drug addicts, welfare cheats, and filthy women with children hanging onto their skirts – all dressed in rags and begging for spare change. Solutions to this Puerto Rican problem have been offered by the IMF in the Krueger Report and in For Puerto Rico, There is a Better Way. These include eliminating the minimum wage, firing more teachers, closing more schools, and re-instating child labor.

While insightful and progressive, these remedies do not go far enough – and revenue benefits will not be immediate. Accordingly I submit a modest proposal, for dealing with our Puerto Rican problem.

When Puerto Rican children grow to maturity, they are generally uneducated and lazy – so there is no point in wasting educational resources on them. However there is a fair, cheap and easy method of making these Puerto Rican children sound and useful members of the commonwealth.

Selling the children will not work. According to the IMF, a Puerto Rican boy or girl is not a saleable commodity before twelve years of age. And even at age twelve, they will not yield over $50 on the open market, since Puerto Ricans are notoriously and congenitally lazy.

But according to the IMF, there is a growing culinary market. A Puerto Rican child that is well-nursed until the age of three, is a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food: whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled. For some reason, the children from Ponce are especially succulent in a fricassee or seafood paella.

A Puerto Rican child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends – and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish for three days. On the fourth day, seasoned with a little Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer, the child will be very good boiled.

Paella with mixed Puerto Rican 

According to the IMF and two hedge funds, the carcass of a good fat child will bring $250 on the open market. If the carcass is seasoned and well-cured, it could be sold to persons of quality as a prime dainty, for as much as $750.

In addition the Puerto Rican carcass, when artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.

The infant flesh will be available at Walmart, Costco, Sam’s Club, Walgreens, and other fine food venues. It will be in season throughout the year – but more plentiful toward the end of every month, when funds start to run low in the Puerto Rican economy.

From a public policy standpoint, this proposal is certain to attract widespread support:

1. On an island with no capital resources or manufacturing base, it will create 10,000 butcher jobs and an immediate child meat industry.
2. Fewer Puerto Rican children will reduce the amount of money wasted on teachers and schools: one of the key IMF concerns.
3. Family values will be restored, with more two-parent Puerto Rican homes devoted to the care and feeding of their valuable children.
4. US investment opportunities, and distressed asset sales, will multiply due to the rapid de-population of the island.
5. Jones Act reform can be postponed for another fifty years.
6. The 78 mayors of Puerto Rico, and the two majority political parties (PPD and PNP), will no longer depend on municipal bond financing from Wall Street, but will prosper as purveyors of Puerto Rican meat.
7. The tourist industry will be revitalized, with five-star hotels and world-class chefs, all offering the finest Puerto Rican cuisine on the planet.

Since Puerto Rico is a colony, and has been prohibited from developing its own economy, manufacturing base, or entrepreneurial class for the past 117 years, the island has no internal resources for repaying its “public debt” of $73 billion.

With the IMF, hedge funds, vulture funds, John Paulson, and US billionaires all circling around the island, I offer this modest proposal – as the only means for Puerto Rico to meet its public debt, and other colonial obligations.

**This article owes a great debt to A Modest Proposal, which was published by Jonathan Swift in 1729, and helped the Irish Republic to gain its freedom.