Puerto Rico is just the canary in our debt coal mine.

The U.S. territory likely will miss another big payment deadline on its $72 billion bond debt this July. The so-called “commonwealth,” whose citizens are also citizens of the U.S., has a population around 3.5 million, which means the debt is an astounding $20,500 for every man, woman and child.

With half the population living in poverty and the island mired in a 10-year recession, there’s no reason to believe the promised interest and principal will ever be repaid. The governor is already talking about paying as little as 39 cents on the dollar.

The Obama administration wants Congress to authorize the Puerto Rican government to declare selective bankruptcies to escape the overdue bills. That’s effectively a bondholder bailout, similar to the one Obama used to save General Motors. That company got federal permission to make bondholders pay for its mistakes, even though many of those creditors were legally supposed to be paid before anyone else.

If you think only the rich suffer from that type of bailout, better check your 401(k) bond list. Tax-exempt Puerto Rico bonds, now rated as junk, were long favorites to add to investment portfolios, so police, firefighters, teachers and union carpenters will pay out of their retirement funds to cover the island’s spending spree.

If Democrats controlled Congress, we’d probably already have a federal bailout that would put us all on the hook. After all, the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans who have left for the mainland over past decades are an important voting bloc for the party.

But Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has made it clear that isn’t going to happen. His party favors a federal oversight panel to stop the spending madness, which would simply resume if the territory’s debts are paid off by Congress or forgiven by federal courts.

Ryan knows that whatever measures Congress takes will become a blueprint for bailing out big-spending American states and cities. So before condemning Puerto Rico, it’s only fair that we look at our own state’s recklessness.

Connecticut, with around the same 3.5 million population, has more than $100 billion in unfunded future liabilities, including bond and pension payments. And while the state has enough wealth and tax revenue to put off the day of reckoning, that day will come.

In Puerto Rico, the territorial government refused to institute unpopular austerity measures, so it repeatedly issued new bond offerings to make payments on old bonds. In Connecticut we’ve been doing essentially the same thing with bond “premiums,” cash the state initially receives from investors in exchange for us paying higher interest on those loans. It’s the same short-term thinking with bad long-term consequences.

In Puerto Rico, businesses fled the island as the tax squeeze began to hit. In Connecticut, General Electric’s exit and Aetna’s shift to Kentucky are also partly attributable to taxes and enormous debt liabilities.

In Puerto Rico, the business exodus sparked a people exodus, which increased taxes on those who remained, prompting more of both to leave. The remaining people are increasingly elderly and poor, and half of them are on Medicaid or Medicare, adding to the financial pressures. In Connecticut …

Get the picture?
