henryb said:
The United States has a lot of companies that are run by the government. Amtrak, for example. It is not an airline, evidently, but it is still a transportation company that is heavily subsidized.
Absolutely correct, and in my opinion subsidies are the worst thing a country can do in the long run. Ask the people who are soon going to have to pay 4 pesos or so for a bus ride (from what, 1.10 or 1.20?), or watch the prices of their utilities sky-rocket, as the government pulls out the subsidies that have been in place for so long.
And the opposite, taxing exports like crazy and destroying industries like the meat industry here in Argentina, where the country now has to import from countries like Paraguay and watch the meat prices increase even more. And in Paraguay, it's having a similar effect because no one wants to sell at a good price locally when they can export for a much higher price. Talk about domino effects...
And notice that the loss of subsidies is going to happen AFTER the election, as the governments dollar reserves (lately stolen from the private pensions of the country) are so low the government is unable to artificially keep the price of the peso low to the dollar. If they were really interested in helping people, they would have done this a long time ago when inflation was not so bad and the peso was closer to the dollar.
When I first came here in 2006, the peso was 2.8 to the dollar (or so, somewhere around there as memory serves).
There is corrutpion everywhere - even in the US. The US is falling year by year because of this, and because socialists are winning too many victories against idiotic conservatives who put too much importance on regulating social behavior and not enough on providing true law and order EQUALLY within a truly free market. (I'm a Libertarian, but not as extreme as Ron Paul).
In reality, the entire world is going to hell in a handbasket!