Sometimes a chart explains things better than a million words of analysis.

This one here, from Venezuelan film director Jonathan Jakubovitz, might just fall into that category:

Interesantes los cambios en los índices de pobreza en Suramérica en una década. Muy fuerte lo de Argentina, y Venezuela ni hablar. pic.twitter.com/L26fHSun33

— Jonathan Jakubowicz (@JoJakubowicz) December 23, 2023

Venezuela has become a black hole based on the miracle of socialism, obviously.

But look how steep the fall was in Argentina over the past ten years, most of which was run with socialist rule.

In 2012, the first year shown, far left socialist Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was president until 2015. In the decade prior to that, her socialist husband, Nestor Kirchner, ran the country.

From 2015 - 2019, they got a reprieve in Mauricio Macri, who was a soft conservative. Nothing changed for the better.

From 2019 - 2023, they got far-left Alberto Fernandez, with Cristina Fernandez his vice president. Everyone knew he was a placeholder for the real power behind the throne, Cristina Fernandez, so it was More Cristina.

Throughout all this, the poverty level in the country rose to 36% by 2022. Most recent data show that it's risen to 40% in 2023, up from 4% in 2012.

Other than Venezuela, that's a stunning reversal of fortune. Nobody fell harder than Argentina even as nearly all countries (except Paraguay) saw their living standards fall downward.

In Argentina, which had been a reasonably prosperous, middle-class country, that must have been a hard blow, with nearly half the people suddenly living on less than $5.50 a day. That's the kind of poverty we see in places like Haiti and Honduras, except that the memory of better things was live memory.

These are people Eric Hoffer described in his 1951 bestseller, "The True Believer," as "the new poor," which is one of the most revolutionary classes ripe for revolution out there.

Any questions as to why so many of them voted for Javier Milei, the anarcho-capitalist, bringing him to victory? It was revolution, done democratically, such as middle class societies are wont to do.

The rising poverty rates are telling as one sees on that continent. All of them coincided with elected socialist rule. Brazil's wasn't that bad, but only because they had an interval with populist conservative Jair Bolsonaro, who likely lifted living standards until COVID and its lockdowns did their damage. The others have seen horrible drops, Ecuador's poverty rising 5 percentage points (protected to some extent by its use of the dollar), Colombia's poverty rising 8 percentage points with socialist rule to blame, Guyana's poverty rising 12 percentage points although this figure only goes to 2022, and they have seen a surge in prosperity in the past year based on oil income, so the jury is out on that. Brazil's and Uruguay's poverty is up four percentage points, although Uruguay remained in the non-poverty zone based on the chart owing to its history of fiscal discipline. Bolivia's poverty went up 8 percentage points, Peru's went up 1 percentage point, Chile's went up 3 percentage points but remained out of poverty. All, again were victims of socialist rule, but Chile had a bank of capital in its private savings program (the Chilean Model) that kept it out of significant poverty. The others did not, and Argentina and Venezuela especially did not.

Venezuela's poverty rose 61 percentage points in the past ten years, which explains the current migration wave. The kind of socialism Venezuela has, goes well beyond mere nightmare economics and has extended to the destruction of political freedom, much as the Cuban communist regime and the Bolshevik one it modeled itself after, had done.

Argentina's poverty rose 36 percentage points over the decade and with still enough political freedom left, Argentinians elected Milei.

What a glorious response that was. 

The precipitous drop in living standards and the monster rise in poverty tells us the story of what socialism does and why Argentinians elected wildly radical libertarian Milei.

And if we look to the United States, the story is comparable and in some ways even more alarming: Under Joe Biden's socialism, U.S. poverty has risen 5 percentage points from 7.4% to 12.4% over a mere one year's time, not ten years, according to a report in Time magazine.

The U.S. poverty rate saw its largest one-year increase in history. 12.4% of Americans now live in poverty according to new 2022 data from the U.S. census, an increase from 7.4% in 2021. Child poverty also more than doubled last year to 12.4% from 5.2% the year before.

The U.S. poverty level is now $13,590 for individuals and $23,030 for a family of three. The new data shows that 37.9 million people lived in poverty in 2022.

That story is the same everywhere on what socialism does and why people take chances on change. The correlation is so close it needs to become better known: Vote for a socialist, find poverty as a result. Happens every time.

Image: Screen shot from Twitter, adapted from a shareable Instagram post.