Progressives and The Venezuelan Political Tactics

[steve_bank]

It looks like some progressives are taking from the Venezuelan playbook. Pay for support by promising free everything and taxing the upper class to pay for it.

Somehow our progressives think taxing the rich will pat for it all. Get the pitchforks and go after those veil rich people. Flipside of the Trump fear mongering.

universal health care, forgiving all student loan debt, universal child care have been discussed and more to come.

Progressives seem to have little to say on infrastructure.

It is never free, somebody has to work to pay for it.

 

[ZiprHead]

If you think universal healthcare and student loan forgiveness caused Venezuela's collapse, then you're opinion on the issue is far too stupid to address.

 

[steve_bank]

If you think universal healthcare and student loan forgiveness caused Venezuela's collapse, then you're opinion on the issue is far too stupid to address.

No you fool. Promising the people free everything and ruining the economy trying to do it. The old get rid of the rich and all is well paradigm.

The outstanding student loan and an anticipated addition for free education debt is around $1 trillion dollars.

Universal health carte like expanding Medicaid would require user payments like today. Everything can not come from taxes. In China international athlete's hand over a large part of earnings to the state. Should we do that to wealthy pro athlete's? Should somebody getting rich playing golf while teachers struggle be allowed? Point being where would it end? At some point commitments and resources do not line up, as in Venezuela.

France is looking more like a failing socialist system.

Do you want to get rid of the free market system and go to a socialist system. That is where progressives are heading.

 

[Patooka]

So all countries with universal healthcare end up like Venezuela. That's as fucking stupid as saying all free market countries and up like Somalia.

 

[Ford]

So all countries with universal healthcare end up like Venezuela.

That's the fall-back position for wingers. They point to Venezuela, because they'd look ridiculous saying "universal health care? You wanna end up like Norway???!!!"

Or Finland. Sweden. Denmark. The Netherlands. Switzerland. Canada. Etc.

They have to point to Venezuela because that's pretty much all they've got. And yes, it's fucking stupid.

 

[ZiprHead]

What's more likely to ruin this nation's economy is the republican propensity to spend and spend while continually cutting taxes, especially on the wealthy.

 

[ZiprHead]

Since there is nothing here about presidential politics, I have moved this thread to Political Discussions.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If you think universal healthcare and student loan forgiveness caused Venezuela's collapse, then you're opinion on the issue is far too stupid to address.

For years I have been pointing out myriad ways leftists on here have been trying to dress up eat-the-rich as a good idea. He's not just talking about UHC and student loan forgiveness.

Besides, note where I stand on these:

UHC: From a social point I consider it a good idea. I'm opposed because I think it will go badly, not because I think it's a bad thing. We can't even fix the UHC systems we have, we shouldn't be looking to add more!

Student loan forgiveness: There are multiple issues here:

Loans where the students didn't know what is up (plenty of these cases at the for-profit schools), forgive, take it out of the hides of the people that were running them. Doubly so for the brighter students where the schools simply forged the signatures rather than even trick them into signing.

Low-value degrees, nope. There are far too many with degrees that are of little market value.

I would like to see one big change to how it works, though: Student loan repayment should be tied to your taxable income. Your loan payments are capped at x% of AGI over the poverty line. Payments of this amount are considered current even if that's less than the interest. (Obviously, if the payment is too low it will take you longer to pay it off.)

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

It looks like some progressives are taking from the Venezuelan playbook. Pay for support by promising free everything and taxing the upper class to pay for it.

Somehow our progressives think taxing the rich will pat for it all. Get the pitchforks and go after those veil rich people. Flipside of the Trump fear mongering.

universal health care, forgiving all student loan debt, universal child care have been discussed and more to come.

Progressives seem to have little to say on infrastructure.

It is never free, somebody has to work to pay for it.

Lately you're beginning to sound more and more like people I know personally who have benefited greatly from progressive legislation. And now that they have their's, they want to keep it all for themselves and turn into right wing fear mongers. These people are merely opportunistic assholes who don't give a shit about anyone but themselves.

 

[laughing dog]

No you fool. Promising the people free everything and ruining the economy trying to do it. The old get rid of the rich and all is well paradigm.

Venezuela ruined its economy by relying on high oil prices and Cuban largesse, not by taxing the rich and giving everything away for free, so your Venezuelan example is wrongheaded.

If your point is that resources for programs (progressive or regressive, liberal or conservative) have to come from somewhere, and that the requisite resources for the proposals are likely to "ruin or alter the economy in some undesirable way, you have a real point. However, restricting that point to "progressive" when current Republican or conservative policies are also just as resource poor makes your argument appear less rational and more partisan-driven stupidity.

 

[bilby]

It looks like some progressives are taking from the Venezuelan playbook. Pay for support by promising free everything and taxing the upper class to pay for it.

Somehow our progressives think taxing the rich will pat for it all. Get the pitchforks and go after those veil rich people. Flipside of the Trump fear mongering.

universal health care, forgiving all student loan debt, universal child care have been discussed and more to come.

Progressives seem to have little to say on infrastructure.

It is never free, somebody has to work to pay for it.

Lately you're beginning to sound more and more like people I know personally who have benefited greatly from progressive legislation. And now that they have their's, they want to keep it all for themselves and turn into right wing fear mongers. These people are merely opportunistic assholes who don't give a shit about anyone but themselves.

Infrastructure isn't free, in the same way that a set of high quality tools aren't free.

Infrastructure is an investment. If you pay for quality today, you can make FAR more than your money back over time.

So it's a false economy to 'balance the budget', when you could instead borrow to invest in infrastructure. As long as interest rates are low, and the infrastructure is genuinely helpful.

Who's going to pay for all that 'free' infrastructure? Our very wealthy children and grandchildren, who got rich because it was there for them to use, that's who. They can easily afford it. Unless we cripple their ability to get rich, in the name of "austerity".

 

[Canard DuJour]

Infrastructure isn't free, in the same way that a set of high quality tools aren't free.

Infrastructure is an investment. If you pay for quality today, you can make FAR more than your money back over time.

So it's a false economy to 'balance the budget', when you could instead borrow to invest in infrastructure. As long as interest rates are low, and the infrastructure is genuinely helpful.

Who's going to pay for all that 'free' infrastructure? Our very wealthy children and grandchildren, who got rich because it was there for them to use, that's who. They can easily afford it. Unless we cripple their ability to get rich, in the name of "austerity".

Yep.

For example, the fiscal multiplier (the return on investment for each $1 dollar of government spending) on healthcare spending is typically >4. That is, each $1 spent on healthcare generates about $4 worth of additional economic activity. So long as you have sufficient real resources to provide the healthcare without "crowding out" other economic activity (in which case you get inflation), it pays for itself. That's how every first world nation can afford it.

Does investment in the health sector promote or inhibit economic growth?

Venezuela OTOH did not have sufficient real resources once oil revenues collapsed. It even had to import fuel, having insufficient capacity to refine crude (which is otherwise basically useless).

That's the fall-back position for wingers. They point to Venezuela, because they'd look ridiculous saying "universal health care? You wanna end up like Norway???!!!"

Or Finland. Sweden. Denmark. The Netherlands. Switzerland. Canada. Etc.

They have to point to Venezuela because that's pretty much all they've got. And yes, it's fucking stupid.

Yep.

 

[PyramidHead]

Venezuela's economic collapse was a murder, not a suicide
Recommend reading in full.

During the 1973 oil embargo, the US relied more heavily on Venezuelan oil. The Venezuelan president (not a socialist) intended to nationalize oil to finance the diversification of Venezuela’s economy. So nationalization started in 1976.

But they never got around to diversifying their economy. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, predatory foreign capitalists acted as loan sharks against Venezuela. Debt and turbulent oil prices led to rampant inflation.

For two decades, under US neoliberal guidance, the Venezuelan government tried the standard capitalist austerity measures, such as: privatization, deregulation, budget cuts, union-busting and submission to IMF coercion via more debt.

None of this improved their economy.

In fact, while education levels reached new heights in the ’80s and ’90s, employment and wages cratered. The country slid into further inequality, instability and a series of impeachment and coup attempts.

When people protested against capitalist austerity measures, the government responded with mass executions.

Working class people, unhappy with these conditions, voted for the left-wing Chavez in the 1998 election. His political program, dubbed “Chavismo,” is not really textbook socialism (because socialism is when workers own the means of production and exchange). However, Chavez tried to redistribute wealth away from international companies and towards the working class, so let’s go ahead and concede that this is sort of socialist.

In 2002, the right wing attempted a coup (with the CIA’s tacit approval or outright participation, depending on how much you believe the Bush administration’s version of the story). But the coup failed to remove Chavez from office.

When Chavez first came to power, his neoliberal opponents still controlled the state-run oil company. Concurrent with the failed coup in 2002, they cut oil production in order to de-fund Chavez’s promised social welfare programs. They hoped the ensuing economic recession would undermine working-class support for Chavez. It’s a strategy that successfully unseated leftist leaders in other Latin American countries.

The article goes on to cite statistics showing unprecedented improvements in Venezuelan society in the decade following Chavez coming to power. I encourage taking this into account rather than focusing on the last couple of years, during which sanctions and oil shortages crippled their economy.

The historical US playbook in Latin America:
-A country’s working class wants a bigger slice of the pie, so they freely choose to elect socialists.
-Business owners, who don’t want to relinquish profits to workers, respond with violence.
-The US funds, arms and directs right-wing murder squads to terrorize the working-class majority into submission to US-backed dictators.

For example, in the 1980s, the US sent about $2 million per day to the military dictatorship in El Salvador to subdue an insurgency of peasants, indigenous people and workers. The CIA advised the Salvadoran military dictatorship on intimidation tactics. Here’s what we bought with our tax dollars:

“A Catholic priest reported that a peasant woman briefly left her three small children in the care of her mother and sister. When she returned, she found that all five had been decapitated by the Salvadoran National Guard. Their bodies were sitting around a table, with their hands placed on their heads in front of them, ‘as though each body was stroking its own head.’ The hand of one, a toddler, apparently kept slipping off her small head, so it had been nailed onto it. At the center of the table was a large bowl full of blood.”

What follows is an extensive list of US-backed atrocities in Central and South America fitting this general pattern.

Economics does not exist as a mathematical engineering problem and never has. It has always been, and will continue to be, political and cultural at its core.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Venezuela's economic collapse was a murder, not a suicide
Recommend reading in full.

If you're interested in crackpots, that is.

None of this improved their economy.

Of course it didn't--because the powers that be were interested in looting, not in the economy.

Working class people, unhappy with these conditions, voted for the left-wing Chavez in the 1998 election. His political program, dubbed “Chavismo,” is not really textbook socialism (because socialism is when workers own the means of production and exchange). However, Chavez tried to redistribute wealth away from international companies and towards the working class, so let’s go ahead and concede that this is sort of socialist.

He redistributed wealth away from international companies to his own cronies, with a bit thrown to the poor to buy popular support--what socialism actually is in reality.

The problem also is that he extracted too much, the maintenance wasn't done. Again, the usual result of leftists taking power. When things ran downhill enough he started nationalizing because there wasn't anything more to loot.

The article goes on to cite statistics showing unprecedented improvements in Venezuelan society in the decade following Chavez coming to power. I encourage taking this into account rather than focusing on the last couple of years, during which sanctions and oil shortages crippled their economy.

Throwing the poor a few crumbs was enough to do that. Doesn't mean it would work in the long run.

 

[Derec]

Venezuela ruined its economy by relying on high oil prices and Cuban largesse, not by taxing the rich and giving everything away for free, so your Venezuelan example is wrongheaded.

As usual, you are mostly wrong.
First of all, Cuba was (and is) in no position to offer anybody largesse[sic]. It was the other way around - Boligarchs are sending highly subsidized oil to Cuba.
Venezuela Won’t Stop Sending Oil To Cuba Despite New Sanctions

Cuba is heavily reliant on subsidized Venezuelan oil shipments, which is why Washington is apparently trying to hit two birds with one stone by stopping these shipments. The leader of the Venezuelan opposition, Juan Guaido, last month ordered the suspension of these deliveries, but PDVSA’s management is still loyal to the Maduro government, so the order had more of a symbolic significance than anything else.
[..]
Yet Venezuelan oil and oil products have continued to play an important role in Cuba’s energy supply, not least because it has been, from a certain perspective, free. The two have a barter deal; Cuba sends highly trained doctors and other personnel to Venezuela in exchange for the barrels.

Those Cuban doctors conscripted to serve in Venezuela are, by the way, paid peanuts.

Venezuela was even donating heating oil to the poor in the US.
Venezuela’s troubles put U.S. heating oil charity in limbo

You are right that high oil prices played a role in masking the rot that Chavez' policies were spreading all over Venezuelan economy due to things like currency and price controls and creating an environment hostile to private business. But overspending on social programs at home using PDVSA as a piggy bank meant that PDVSA did not have enough money left to invest in its actual business which is oil. That and Chavez replacing competent managers with party apparatchiks led oil production starting to decline long before oil prices did.

Some of Chavez' spending was sensible in principle - investing in education or medicine for example. But he should have financed that more responsibly even if it meant a slower pace of investment. And he should not have instituted his anti-free market policies of course.

 

[Derec]

Infrastructure is an investment. If you pay for quality today, you can make FAR more than your money back over time.

So far so good. What Chavez did though was raid the PDVSA budget for his pet projects (which included sending tankers of oil to Cuba and giving away heating oil in Massachusetts) which meant PDVSA did not have enough capital to invest in oil infrastructure, which meant that oil production started to decline because you have to keep spending money on oil fields to make money from them.

So it's a false economy to 'balance the budget', when you could instead borrow to invest in infrastructure. As long as interest rates are low, and the infrastructure is genuinely helpful.

Right. Not all spending is the same.

Venezuela OTOH did not have sufficient real resources once oil revenues collapsed. It even had to import fuel, having insufficient capacity to refine crude (which is otherwise basically useless).

My understanding it that it imported light crude to upgrade its extra heavy oil. Venezuela is still a net exporter, even if the production is much lower than it used to be, thanks to insufficient investment.

They have to point to Venezuela because that's pretty much all they've got. And yes, it's fucking stupid.

Yep.

Well most other socialist countries have collapsed or given up socialism.

 

[Derec]

Venezuela's economic collapse was a murder, not a suicide

What a ridiculous piece of pro-Chavez propaganda!

Recommend reading in full.

I did, and feel the same as that quiz host did in Billy Madison.

But they never got around to diversifying their economy. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, predatory foreign capitalists acted as loan sharks against Venezuela. Debt and turbulent oil prices led to rampant inflation.

Those evil capitalists! And note that Chavismo not only failed to diversify the economy, they made it less diverse by going after private businesses.

When Chavez first came to power, his neoliberal opponents still controlled the state-run oil company. Concurrent with the failed coup in 2002, they cut oil production in order to de-fund Chavez’s promised social welfare programs. They hoped the ensuing economic recession would undermine working-class support for Chavez. It’s a strategy that successfully unseated leftist leaders in other Latin American countries.

This guy sees conspiracies everywhere. The fact is that Chavez misused PDVSA as a piggy bank for his spending programs. And after 2002 he staffed the company with loyalists. The production kept declining. So much for the conspiracy theory that production decline was a conspiracy by his enemies.

The article goes on to cite statistics showing unprecedented improvements in Venezuelan society in the decade following Chavez coming to power. I encourage taking this into account rather than focusing on the last couple of years, during which sanctions and oil shortages crippled their economy.

Certain metrics in Venezuela improved, yes. Nobody is disputing that. But Chavez had unprecedented luck that oil prices increased more than 10x between 1999 and 2008. If you win the lottery (say a million), your personal finances will look better too for a while even if you are horribly mismanaging that windfall. Until the money runs out that is.

That enabled the Chavez regime to spend like drunken sailor and have an appearance of success while the rot inherent in his policies was masked by high oil prices. Note that when oil prices declined during the financial prices in 2008 and again due to the shale revolution they were still a lot higher than they were in 1998-99. And yet the situation in Venezuela is much, much worse. That is all due to the policies Chavez implemented and Maduro continued.

The historical US playbook in Latin America:
-A country’s working class wants a bigger slice of the pie, so they freely choose to elect socialists.
-Business owners, who don’t want to relinquish profits to workers, respond with violence.
-The US funds, arms and directs right-wing murder squads to terrorize the working-class majority into submission to US-backed dictators.

Except that it is pro-Chavismo bands of "Colectivos" that are terrorizing the populace with violence in Venezuela.

Economics does not exist as a mathematical engineering problem and never has. It has always been, and will continue to be, political and cultural at its core.

Politics and culture should not be neglected, but neither should the mathematical, scientific part either. People have predicted this outcome of Venezuelan policies like currency and price controls years before shit hit the fan.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

So all countries with universal healthcare end up like Venezuela. That's as fucking stupid as saying all free market countries and up like Somalia.

No single drop thinks it is responsible for the flood. You are asking which one drop caused the flood.

So it's a false economy to 'balance the budget', when you could instead borrow to invest in infrastructure. As long as interest rates are low, and the infrastructure is genuinely helpful.

You know, you could have both a balanced budget and spending on infrastructure. Just make sure you have enough coming in from taxes to pay for it. It is saner that way.

 

[Patooka]

So all countries with universal healthcare end up like Venezuela. That's as fucking stupid as saying all free market countries and up like Somalia.

No single drop thinks it is responsible for the flood. You are asking which one drop caused the flood.

I have no idea what you mean. Maybe I wasn't clear; there is a prevalent belief from the right that any public healthcare system will always, always lead to a country ending up like Venezuela, which is bullshit.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

So all countries with universal healthcare end up like Venezuela. That's as fucking stupid as saying all free market countries and up like Somalia.

No single drop thinks it is responsible for the flood. You are asking which one drop caused the flood.

I have no idea what you mean. Maybe I wasn't clear; there is a prevalent belief from the right that any public healthcare system will always, always lead to a country ending up like Venezuela, which is bullshit.

Your response makes it clear you have no idea what I mean. Public Healthcare is a drop. So is whatever other program you advocate or will advocate for tomorrow. And each drop is only a drop. None of the drops is responsible for the flood, even though they all are.