Brazil's Election Shows How The Left Thrives On Welfare Dependency
Dependency: A Brazilian economist has shown a near-exact correlation between last Sunday's presidential election voting choices and each state's welfare ratios. Sure enough, handouts are the lifeblood of the left.
Much of the attention in Brazil's presidential election has been on the surprise rise of Aecio Neves, the center-right candidate who bolted to second place in the space of a week in the first round of Brazil's election last Sunday, putting him in a face-off against leftist incumbent Dilma Rousseff at the end of the month.
Neves won 34% of the vote, Rousseff took 42% and green party candidate Marina Silva took about 20% — and on Thursday, Silva endorsed Neves, making it a contest of free-market ideas vs. big-government statism.
But what's even more telling is an old story — shown in an infographic by popular Brazilian economist Ricardo Amorim.
In a Twitter post, Amorim showed a near-exact correlation among Brazil's states' welfare dependency and their votes for leftist Workers Party incumbent Rousseff.
Virtually every state that went for Rousseff has at least 25% of the population dependent on Brazil's Bolsa Familia welfare program of cash for single mothers, given for keeping children vaccinated and in school.
States with less than 25% of the population on Bolsa Familia overwhelmingly went for Neves and his policies of growth.
The World Bank and others praise Bolsa Familia's "poverty alleviation." Problem is, "some experts warn that a wide majority cannot get out of this dependence relationship with the government," as the U.K. Guardian put it.
And whether it's best for a country that aspires to become a global economic powerhouse to have a quarter of the population — 50 million people — dependent on welfare and producing nothing is questionable.
The cash payouts amount to a half percentage of GDP and 2.5% of government spending. Money spent on welfare is money that can't be put to use in creating jobs.
Amorim points out that Brazil's 2% average GDP between 2011 and 2013 is the second lowest in all Latin America, topping only El Salvador, another country with a sizable welfare population — and millions of illegal immigrants in the U.S.
Fact is, the left cannot survive without a vast class of dependents. And once in, dependents have difficulty getting out.
So Brazil's election may come down to a question of whether it wants to be a an economic powerhouse — or a handout republic.
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