The Rio Olympic Games start tonight, and there’s no use worrying about an impending disaster, because the event is a disaster already. Thanks to the leftist government running the country, the inherent problems that face the state of Rio de Janeiro have already manifested themselves. The Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) has run the country since 2003; President Dilma Rousseff was elected in 2010, when Brazil’s GDP grew 7.5%, but in 2014 Brazil’s credit rating was downgraded by Standard & Poor’s to BBB in March 2014, just one notch above junk, and the economy shrank 3.8% last year, the biggest contraction in a quarter-century, according to The Wall Street Journal. As a result of the country’s financial crisis, Rio state has slashed the budgets for police and firefighters. The Heritage Foundation states, “The onerous regulatory environment hinders needed economic transformation and undercuts realization of the economy’s full potential. Growing public debt and higher debt service costs have kept fiscal pressure high, and burdensome taxes further crowd out private-sector growth.”
Here are four examples showing why the selection of Rio for the games was a miserable failure:
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