Raising the corporate tax rate and the minimum wage aren’t just hot leftist ideas in America. Forget the “Fight for $15”. Venezuela just raised its minimum wage by 3,000%.
That adds up to $30 a month.
At least if you trust Venezuelan exchange rates. Which no one in the failed socialist state does.
“I want the country to recover and I have the formula. Trust me,” President Maduro, the union boss turned incompetent dictator, declared, touting his “monetary reconversion and integral economic reconversion.”
The formula, meant to save a country whose people are fleeing massive gang violence, hunger, lack of food, water, power, and medicine, includes a higher corporate tax rate and a higher minimum wage. The latest currency devaluation pegs its worthless money (expected to hit 1 million percent inflation) to its dubious cryptocurrency which is pegged to Maduro’s hallucinatory version of revolutionary socialism.
Venezuela’s economic collapse is not an outlier. Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, the Marxist terror boss whom every 80s leftist, from John Kerry to Bernie Sanders, had a crush on, touched off another mess.
Unemployment has nearly doubled as 86,000 jobs vanished. A contraction of 6% is being predicted. The country’s $13 billion economy depends on under a billion in tourism and $725 million in remittances. Venezuela is starving, and though its government is still subsidizing Cuba, it can’t also afford to keep floating his Sandinista Marxist allies.
The direct reason for this crisis can be found in the violent riots tearing apart Nicaragua. But the reason for the rioting is that Nicaragua’s social security fund was running out of money. The Nicaraguan Social Security Institute (INSS) offered very generous retirement benefits beginning at 60. Nicaraguan governments were repeatedly warned that INSS was unsustainable because of the small number of people paying into it and the generous payouts. Even for a socialist, there was no choice except raising payroll taxes and cutting benefits. Either that or Nicaragua would be forced to default on its loans.
But it was too little, too late.
The Sandinistas controlled too much of the government. The last-minute reforms infuriated the public. The socialist paramilitary thugs cracked down violently on protesters turning economic protests into a call to overthrow the government. And the economic collapse means that there won’t be enough money for the economy, the country, and social security. Like Venezuelans, Nicaraguans are flooding into other countries, where they’re being attacked by the local population which isn’t interested in illegal aliens.
American lefties paint a nightmarish picture of the ICE “terrorizing” Latin Americans. But in Brazil and Costa Rica, local mobs are attacking Venezuelan and Nicaraguans who have crossed into their country.
And the devastation is spreading.
The Trump administration’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status for economic migrants from El Salvador is hitting it hard. The American money that they send back to El Salvador makes up some $4.57 billion in remittances of a $27 billion economy. Lefties have praised El Salvador’s income equality and unfavorably compared the “income inequality” in the United States to one of the poorest countries in the region. But it’s easy to have income equality when what’s left of your middle class is sending money back from America by working the lowest types of jobs.
Income equality doesn’t mean everyone rises. It means that everyone falls down and stays there. America’s “unequal” society offers more opportunities, even at the bottom, than “equal” poor societies.
Read the full story from Front Page Mag
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