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Comment by gota | Hacker News Reader

Debatable at best.

1- Employment is slightly increasing but still tragically low. Whatever gains in employment are coming from loss of worker rights.

2- Record historical inequality and increasing means unavoidable civil unrest in the future

3- Inflation is down due to idle capacity, not increasing production

4- Stock market is up at the cost of (the promise of) privatization of oil and profitable public companies

5- Goods and services consumption going up with mean household income going down means people are selling dinner to buy lunch - the government is allowing people to spend their government pension deposits again. Didn't work for long when they did it in 2018, won't work now

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The possibility of growth is at least there if Bolsanaro can mitigate the gross inefficiency of government corruption that has plagued Brazil for so long. See Operation Car Wash for the tip of the iceberg. His politics are almost incidental; the leftists would still be in power if they hadn't habitually robbed the state of its seed money.

You're beating a dead horse with that argument. Brazil has a wealth distribution problem that has little to do with corruption (though that doesn't help), and the parties in power now have been corrupt for decades. It's gonna be solved with long-term, rational public policies, education and strategic investments - like not selling out oil reserves for pennies on the dollar - and not a little bag of extra money.

Even the higher estimates for the Petrobras scandal mean the amount stolen is roughly 1% of the federal annual budget (49B vs 3.2T). If you truly believe this is the country's major issue you've been had by the same people that orchestrated it.

Brazil has a wealth inequality problem because starting a business here is extremely hard. These are problems that Bolsonaro's finance minister has been tackling very hard. Similarly, because of the way the federation is set up it makes things really inefficient. For instance, many cities have to overspend the amount of money they get on education even though they need way more money for general healthcare, but the mayors of those cities can't reallocate those sums of money or they can go to jail for fiscal irresponsibility. This is an outdated system that was set up 30 years ago and never changed again, which effectively makes it impossible for politicians to enact effective change when it comes to something as simple as how they should allocate the money they receive from the union. Similar unhelpful setups run across our entire country which makes it so that it's an extremely costly place to do anything productive in which exacerbates inequality.

The dead weight of corruption is seen not just in the embezzled funds that we happen to know about. Corruption contaminates and degrades everything it touches. The media, which it abducts to its ends. The political atmosphere, which becomes a farce of competing, corrupt self-interests masked behind ideologies that grow ever more extreme as quality of life deteriorates. We enter into a twilight of democracy, where nobody is clean, crime has no meaning, laws serve no good purpose, and no improvement seems possible.

When the powers that be embezzle 49 billion dollars and are voted out, it's a miracle of democracy. It is the one saving grace, the only alternative to continuing decline. The people who orchestrated this are none other than a teetering legal system and voters who were sliding toward the abyss.

The Carwash Judge Moro who Bolsonaro appointed as anti-corruption czar turned out to have rigged the whole operation in colluding with other justices - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/alleged-le...

Very similar to the US and elsewhere where the right act in bad-faith to take over democratic processes.

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