Did it ever get this bad when Chavez was leading the country?
“Did it ever get this bad when Chavez was leading the country?”
No.
1. Oil prices were still high enough then to prop up their give-aways.
2. Their main hydro-electric reservoir wasn’t nearly empty then.
3. Massive government/crony corruption hadn’t progressed to anywhere near to the degree it is now.
4. “Nationalization” (theft) of essentially all private industry, farmland, and wholesale and retail stores hadn’t yet occurred.
5. Economically insane price controls had not yet been imposed, thus causing inflation to soon run around a couple of thousand percent a year.
6. The oil fields hadn’t yet been fully “nationalized” (stolen)
7. Chavez was still paying foreign oil service companies for their services, so they were still operating the “nationalized” oil fields.
8. Chavez was till paying foreign suppliers for their goods, goods which essentially make up about 99% of everything consumed or utilized in Venezuela.
Former bus-driver Maduro makes Hugo Chavez look like a Nobel Prize winning economic genius.