Sad, but true.  The last eight years of misery in Puerto Rico have cause so many people to leave the Island it's not even funny.  And it's getting worse.

Recession drives educated Puerto Ricans to South Florida

As a salesman for a health club in a suburb outside Puerto Rico's capital, Frank Oquendo saw up close how his earnings and the gym's membership base tanked along with Puerto Rico's economy.

Earlier this year, Oquendo's bosses cut his pay by 25 percent as a third of the Caguas club's members canceled their contracts because they were leaving Puerto Rico. After two years of soaring inflation and desperation, Oquendo finally packed up and joined his former clients, moving his family to Miami in July.

He joined thousands of middle-class professionals who have fled Puerto Rico in the past two years, becoming what some people are calling ``FloRicans.''

'Sometimes you feel like a traitor when people ask, `Why don't you stay here and work for your country?' '' said Oquendo, 35. ``How long are we supposed to sacrifice our families for unfulfilled promises? I want to help push Puerto Rico forward, but what about my kids?''

Emphasis added.  You just can't fault the guy.  I left because the opportunities in P.R. just weren't there.  And that was back in 1989, when things were nowhere near as disastrous as they are now.  Even back then, if you had a degree in a field where there was any kind of demand, your opportunities just were fabulously better in the U.S.  But there's more:

''We are committing collective suicide,'' said Elías Gutiérrez, who runs the graduate school of planning at the University of Puerto Rico. ``This is going to become a country of elderly and poor people.''

Census figures show at least 200,000 of Puerto Rico's 4 million people moved to Florida from 2000 to 2006, including 14,000 to Broward County and about 8,000 to Miami-Dade. About half of Florida's nearly 700,000 Puerto Ricans live in Central Florida, particularly the Orlando area.

But census figures do not reflect the wave that began two years ago, when a budget crisis forced the Puerto Rican government to shut down for several weeks. More than 70,000 people were temporarily furloughed, so it was not long before nurses, doctors and police officers joined the teachers and out-of-work public servants who headed for Florida.

Many of them found jobs before leaving Puerto Rico as recruiters from employers as varied as NASA, Disney World and the Baltimore Police Department went to Puerto Rico to find highly skilled bilingual labor. The shutdown was followed by an unprecedented increase in the sales tax to as high as 7 percent, which hit Puerto Rican wallets hard as a political crisis gripped the U.S. territory.

Then gas prices climbed, and people saw their electric bills reach as high as $1,000 a month. Government statistics show food prices have increased 12 percent this year, and housing 15 percent.

''People in Puerto Rico make around $24,000 a year,'' said Oquendo's wife, Wilma Nieves, 39. ``Day care centers and private schools cost $600 or $700 a month. Our car payment -- for a Suzuki -- was $500 a month. We were falling behind in our mortgage and other loans. You can't just stay behind and complain. You have to find opportunities.''

The sales tax actually was 6.6%.  It was supposed to eliminate a flat 6.6% tariff automatically imposed on all products entering the Island.  But a lot of the products in the market that had already been subject to the tariff were then subject to the sales tax.  So many of these products were actually taxed twice at an overall rate of around 13.6% (because you are imposing a sales tax on a product that already reflects the tariff, so it's not like adding them both).

Now, if you're Puertorican, this should piss you off:

University of Puerto Rico professor Jorge Duany, who coauthored a 2006 study of Puerto Rican migration patterns, said the island's government has largely ignored the dilemma, because it offers a much-needed safety valve for an economy experts say shrank by 2 percent last year.

''Unemployment is at 12 percent. If all those people had stayed, it would be 24 percent,'' Duany said. ``In the point of view of the individual who decides to emigrate, for the people looking for a job, it's a solution -- a way out. For Puerto Rico collectively, it's a problem.''

And so it goes.  We leave, and some come back.  But in the end, it's Puerto Rico who is impoverished by this pattern.