Brazil is undergoing what is considered its worst economic crisis in seventy years, and there is usually no agreement when it comes to the causes of this situation. President Rousseff and the Labor Party say that it was the corollary of the “International Crisis,” a ghost of the 2008 depression created in their minds. The reality, however, is different. Since ex-president Lula Da Silva of the Labor Party entered office in 2003, the government has clung to the typical Keynesian project of growth-by-government-spending. Interest rates were lowered constantly, the amount of loans grew to an unprecedented level, savings per capita dropped, and government spending continued to grow.
For the advocates of government intervention, the country’s economy was heaven on earth. It should be of no surprise that Paul Krugman, the defender of America’s Quantitative Easing, said that Brazil was not a vulnerable country. However, those policies so strongly defended by some economists and by bureaucrats led the country toward the terrible situation in which it is now.
From the Brazilian government’s point of view, it could hardly get any worse: the country is facing an economic depression that is likely to last at least two more years, the country’s rating was downgraded to junk by Standard & Poor’s, and a corruption scandal may lead to the impeachment of the country’s president, Dilma Rousseff. We must recognize, however, that even though this was the result of the government’s action, it simply put in practice the most prevalent ideologies of the country, which is a mixture of Marxism in politics and in the universities with Keynesianism in economics. This national ideology praises, in general, a complete dependence of the people on the government. The fact that “Brazil’s tax burden already amounts to 36 per cent of GDP” is held with pride by professors and economists throughout the country, who spread the word that public policies will create jobs and contribute to people’s welfare.
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