This is from 11-years ago. There is no “middle class” in Venezuela as America understands the term. These people are just more immigrant votes for democrats:
February 9, 1996
Whatever Happened to Venezuela’s Middle Class?
Excerpt
This Caribbean country of 24 million people, blessed with the world’s largest oil reserves outside the Persian Gulf, last year became the largest foreign supplier of oil to the United States. But its economy is in a shambles and its public payroll so bloated that hospitals cannot afford to buy medicine or equipment, while the Government remains unable — or unwilling — to trim its work force.
The country is entering its fourth year of recession, and the inflation rate, at 54 percent last year, is the highest in South America. Venezuela’s middle class, once accustomed to shopping sprees in Miami, has been reduced to near-poverty.
“The middle class is disappearing,” said Andres Serbin, president of the Venezuelan Institute for Social and Political Studies, a private research institute. “Now you have a clear polarization between the people who have and the people who don’t have.” (snip)
At the start of the 1990’s, Venezuela appeared to be well on its way toward the free-market economic reforms that other parts of Latin America have since embraced. But austerity measures that were endured elsewhere in the continent proved too difficult an adjustment for Venezuelans who, thanks to a $10-billion-a-year cushion of oil revenues, had grown accustomed to government largess.
The backlash against the free-market reforms instituted by Carlos Andres Perez, who was then President, included looting and two attempted military coups in 1992. Although the coups failed, they proved fatal to the economic policies and to the presidency of Mr. Perez, who was impeached in 1993 and charged with stealing $17 million in public funds. He remains under house arrest.
As the country awaited Mr. Perez’s reaction to the second 1992 coup attempt in a televised message from Congress, Rafael Caldera, a former president, unexpectedly took the microphone to voice understanding for the frustrations of the military men who led the coup attempts.
Swept back into the presidency by a mass yearning for less corrupt, more generous past, Mr. Caldera pledged to restore the kind of state-financed populism that had marked his administration in the 1970’s, but he did not address the country’s ability to finance such grand promises in the economy of the 1990’s
His measures have failed to check Venezuela’s economic slide.
According to a recent report by Data Information Resources to the Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce, in the last 25 years the share of household income spent on food has shot up to 72 percent, from 28 percent. The middle class has shrunk by a third. An estimated 53 percent of jobs are now classified as “informal” — in the underground economy — as compared with 33 percent in the late 1970’s.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C06E4DE1539F93AA35751C0A960958260
February 9, 1996 Whatever Happened to Venezuela’s Middle Class? Venezuela’s middle class, once accustomed to shopping sprees in Miami, has been reduced to near-poverty.
"Middle class" is not how much money you have in your bank account at any given time. It is a state of mind that, given the freedom to succeeed, produces money.
If you give trailer trash $1 million, it will be blown in a couple of years and they will have little to show for it.
If you take away everything a hard working businessman ever earned and leave him nothing but the freedom to succeed, he will simply rebuild his wealth all over again.