--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote: What Chavez and Putin have done is to spin the rhetoric of fighting "corruption" and increasing "transparency" into the left direction (in the case of Putin, some may object to calling what he has done "left," but "left" after all is a relative term), taking control of flows of revenues from crucial national assets (most importantly oil) and collecting taxes more efficiently without going so far as to expropriate the expropriators. ---
FWIW here is the size of the Russian federal budget expenditure from 2000-2002 (millions of rubles).
2000 861,373.0 2001 1,193,482.9 2002 1,947,386.2
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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