THE VENEZUELAN SOCIALIST UTOPIA DISASTER

The Federalist Papers Project

Robert Gehl reports in socialist utopia Venezuela, things have gone from bad to worse to comically dreadful.

The country is now in such dire straits that they have extended the already extended three-day weekend for state workers to an astonishing five-day weekend.

That’s because they can’t afford to pay for the electricity to keep the lights on or make payroll. Venezuela is running out of money.

Which leads us to the comical part of this tragedy: The country is so broke, they don’t have enough money to print money.

With inflation set to top 700 percent this year, Venezuelan pesos are worth less and less, meaning it takes more and more to buy anything. So they need more hard currency in circulation (the number of bills in circulations has risen five-fold in three years). But Venezuela doesn’t print their own money. They hire an outside company – De LA Rue – to print their money for them. But Venezuela owes De La Rue $71 million for the money they’ve already printed. So the company is about to turn off the currency spigot.

To give you an idea of how worthless the Venezuelan peso is, the U.S. Treasury printed 7.6 billion banknotes. Venezuela, with an economy a fraction of the size of the United States, ordered 10 billion bank notes.

Meanwhile, Socialist President Nicholas Maduro said an ongoing drought at the nation’s hydroelectric dam threatens to shut off power completely for more than two-thirds of the country.

“The public sector will work Monday and Tuesday, while we go through these critical and extreme weeks where we are doing everything to save the Guri (hydroelectric dam),” Maduro said, referring to the giant hydroelectric dam that has become like a “desert.” The collection of electricity-saving measures have reduced Guri’s daily drop from 22 centimeters a day to 10 centimeters, he added.

On a final note to this comic tragedy, Maduro announced that the time zone for the country would change to save electricity. His predecessor, Hugo Chavez, set clocks back a half-hour in 2007 so school children and the poor could walk to work in the early morning to sunlight. Well, it turns out when the sun’s down they use less electricity, so they’re going back on May 1.

There’s a socialist disaster for you … Venezuela.

So … whose “feelin’ the Bern?”

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