Hamburgers cost $170 in the miserable socialist ‘paradise’ of Venezuela!

[SheriffJoe]

HAMBURGERS COST $170 IN THE MISERABLE SOCIALIST ‘PARADISE’ OF VENEZUELA!


Posted by SooperMexican on May 22, 2016 at 11:11 AM in Politics | 62 Comments

By SooperMexican

Bernie Sanders lovers should take a look at the socialist “paradise” of Venezuela today, where hamburgers are officially $170!

From the AFP:

If a visitor to Venezuela is unfortunate enough to pay for anything with a foreign credit card, the eye-watering cost might suggest they were in a city pricier than Tokyo or Zurich.

A hamburger sold for 1,700 Venezuelan bolivares is $170, or a 69,000-bolivar hotel room is $6,900 a night, based on the official rate of 10 bolivares for $1.
But of course no merchant is pricing at the official rate imposed under currency controls. It’s the black market rate of 1,000 bolivares per dollar that’s applied.
But for Venezuelans paid in hyperinflation-hit bolivares, and living in an economy relying on mostly imported goods or raw materials, conditions are unthinkably expensive.

Even for the middle class, most of it sliding into poverty, hamburgers and hotels are out-of-reach excesses.

“Everybody is knocked low,” Michael Leal, a 34-year-old manager of an eyewear store in Caracas, told AFP. “We can’t breathe.”

In Chacao, a middle-class neighborhood in the capital, office workers lined up outside a nut store to buy the cheapest lunch they could afford. Nearby restaurants were all but empty.

Superficially it looked like the center of any other major Latin American city: skyscrapers, dense traffic, pedestrians in short sleeves bustling along the sidewalks.

But look closely and you can see the economic malaise. Many stores, particularly those that sold electronics, were shuttered.

“It’s horrible now,” said Marta Gonzalez, the 69-year-old manager of a corner beauty products store.

“Nobody is buying anything really. Just food,” she said as a male customer used a debit card to pay for a couple of razor blades.
A sign above the register said “We don’t accept credit cards.”


​

There are huge shortages, and people wait in long lines to BUY stuff that runs out long before they get to it. Just a few short years ago liberals were praising Venezuela for bringing “humanitarianism” into their economic model through socialism. It didn’t take long to show how poorly a state-run economy actually operates.

Read more: http://therightscoop.com/hamburgers...ocialist-paradise-of-venezuela/#ixzz49PrgxjOM

 

[Dave007inVegas]

Oh yeah! I feel the Bern. And remember, vote early and vote often.

 

[SheriffJoe]

Dave, just think how many millions of low-information dim voters embrace this nonsense.

But hey, at least in Venezuela everyone is equal - equally broke and miserable! face)(*^%

Vote Demorcrat! Wheeeeeeeeee!

 

[Dave007inVegas]

Dave, just think how many millions of low-information dim voters embrace this nonsense.

But hey, at least in Venezuela everyone is equal - equally broke and miserable! face)(*^%

Vote Demorcrat! Wheeeeeeeeee!

I’d rather not. It’s depressing. I’m kind of glad I’m old, I won’t be around when the millennia’s run the country.


It will be liberals on steroids.

 

[Willie99]

reality doesn't concern libtards, they have no use for the truth

they dream of utopia, they want to make others make their dreams come true no matter how often their policies fail

the democratic party is a coalition of special interests, everybody wanting government to do something for them

the Constitution and the modern democratic party are incompatible, and that's no joke

 

[SheriffJoe]

Well said, Willie.

Libs always mock the Constitution as "outdated" - they're 'progressives' dontchaknow - but really, the Constitution was intentionally designed to prevent this sorta crap from happening here.

Or, as Jefferson said:

In questions of powers, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution. — Thomas Jefferson

ECON 101:

In the battle of utopia vs human nature, guess which side ALWAYS wins?

 

[JDeuce]

$170 for a burger? Now HERE's a place where $15/hr for flipping burgers may actually work!

It is hard to realize that Venezuela was once a prosperous place that has been decimated by the policies of socialism. Chavez basically nationalized anything of value, and not surprisingly, it quickly descended into a hellhole. Funny, the same thing happened in Argentina, also was once a very prosperous place, after a series of left-leaning leaders left their fingerprints on their economy. Ditto for Cuba. All just a crazy coincidence, right?

Yet dimocraps will cling to their comic book view of capitalism and pretend that is somehow the cause of all this instead of blaming central planning's historical 100% failure rate.

 

[Acebb]

Yeah but college and health care are free!!!

 

[Willie99]

Yeah but college and health care are free!!!

and their president goes to Cuba for medical treatment

 

[SheriffJoe]

Flashback To All The Left Wing Idiots Who Praised Chavez’s Socialism

Dead Socialist Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez was praised throughout his life by many figures in academia, journalism and Hollywood despite his brutal regime.

This praise included Salon writer David Sirota’s piece after the leader’s death, titled “Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle.” In British publication The New Statesman, a headline as Chavez was nearing death in January 2013 was “Hugo Chavez: Man against the world,” and its sub-headline read “As illness ends Hugo Chavez’s rule in Venezuela, what will his legacy be? Richard Gott argues he brought hope to a continent.”
Do You Think Venezuela Is A Good Example Of The Results Of Bernie Sanders' Policy Proposals?
This praise of Chavez by so many who enjoyed the benefits of living in a capitalist society while looking at the economic record of the late leader, as well as what his successor President Nicolas Maduro, has come undone.Mexican NGO, the Citizens’ Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, published its annual ranking of urban crime in January 2016, and found that in 2015, Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, was the most murderous place on Earth. Caracas has 119.87 murders per 100,000 people. Other than personal concerns for safety, Venezuelans suffer from lacking economic opportunity due to low oil prices and government mismanagement of the state-owned oil firm.

From 1998, when Chavez was elected, up until he died in March 2013, “oil output at Pdvsa [the state-owned oil firm] has fallen 25% from 3 million to 2.4 million barrels per day, despite the fact that Venezuela has arguably the biggest hoard of oil reserves in the world, at more than 500 billion barrels,” according to Forbes’ Christopher Helman.

OPEC reports that Venezuela has 24.9 percent of proven crude oil reserves as of the end of 2014 — Saudi Arabia comes in a close second with 22.1 percent. When comparing GDP per capita, however, Venezuela’s economic problems become devastatingly clear. Venezuela’s GDP per capita is $12,771.6 as of 2012, while Saudi Arabia’s GDP per capita is almost double at $24,883.2 for that same year.

Venezuela’s GDP, it’s fair to assume, has only gone down significantly since 2012 (since Venezuela has not provided The World Bank with more recent data), while Saudi Arabia’s 2014 data demonstrates only a slight dip of $24,406.5. An even more damning contrast is the small oil-rich Arab Gulf state of Qatar, which only has 2.1 percent of the world’s proven crude oil reserves, boasts a 2012 and 2014 GDP per capita of $94,407.4 and $96,732.4 respectively.

The economy will only get worse for Venezuela since the country will remain in a recession through the end of 2017, according to the country’s Vice President for the Economy Miguel Perez. The country’s economy shrank by 5.7 percent in 2015 alone, the second year of what will be a long-running economic downturn.

Despite the irrefutable evidence that Venezuela finds itself in an incredible economic hole entirely of its own making, several writers such as Wired’s Linda Poon, continue to peddle headlines like “Venezuela’s Economic Success Fueled Its Electricity Crisis.”

Meanwhile, the Venezuelan workweek for government employees was limited to four days a week and then two days a week in April to deal with electricity shortages. Daily four-hour blackouts across most of Venezuela was another policy implemented in April by the socialist government to deal with its self-made crisis.

Economic problems aside, Venezuela has faced a long-running political crisis. Mass protests in February 2014 were halted through repression and fear-mongering by government forces that arrested the U.S.-educated opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. Venezuelans elected the conservative opposition coalition in December 2015 to take control of the country’s National Assembly, Venezuela’s equivalent of Congress, and it has been in a standoff with the government since.

Socialist Maduro has done everything in his power to stop conservative lawmakers. The power grab by Maduro has led to mass unrest in recent months, which has only further fueled the economic crisis, as oil markets have not reacted well to the potential instability.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/22/f...-who-praised-chavezs-socialism/#ixzz49VzR8RS2

 

[SheriffJoe]

As food grows scarce, Venezuelans turn to dumpster diving

POSTED AT 3:31 PM ON JUNE 8, 2016 BY JOHN SEXTON


To the long list of degradations the people of Venezuela have to suffer because of their awful socialist government, you can now add dumpster diving. The Associated Press reports that people desperate for food have now turned to rooting through the garbage for meals:

Until recently, Julio Noguera worked at a bakery. Now he spends his evenings searching through the garbage for food.

“I come here looking for food because if I didn’t, I’d starve to death,” Noguera said as he sorted through a pile of moldy potatoes. “With things like they are, no one helps anyone and no one gives away meals.”

Across town, unemployed people converge every dusk at a trash heap on a downtown Caracas sidewalk to pick through rotten fruit and vegetables tossed out by nearby shops. They are frequently joined by small business owners, college students and pensioners – people who consider themselves middle class even though their living standards have long ago been pulverized by triple-digit inflation, food shortages and a collapsing currency.


​

The socialist revolution started by Hugo Chavez was explicitly designed to spread the wealth around and lift the country’s poor out of poverty. For a while it did, which thrilled socialists around the world as a visible sign of success. But now, with a few more years of corruption, central economic planning and a downturn in oil prices, Venezuelans are desperate and hungry.

Venezuela’s poverty had eased during the administration of the late President Hugo Chavez. But a study by three leading Caracas universities found that 76 percent of Venezuelans are now under the poverty line, compared with 52 percent in 2014…

Nearly half of Venezuelans say they can no longer afford to eat three meals a day, according to a recent poll by the local firm Venebarometro. The poll surveyed 1,200 adults at their homes the first week in April and had a margin of error of plus or minus of about 2 percentage points.


​

Venezuelans have been trying to remove the socialist government. Last December, voters gave the opposition control of the National Assembly but that body has limited power in a country largely run by the dictates of socialist president Nicolas Maduro. The opposition has started arecall referendum to remove Maduro from office but the government has been slow-walking the process. The goal seems to be to delay Maduro’s removal until next year when, under Venezuelan law, Maduro’s socialist vice president would serve out the remainder of his term.