Price of politics

President Hugo Chavez has won friends at home and abroad with his generous spending on social programs ranging from support for Venezuela’s single mothers to shipments of cheap heating oil to poor Americans.

But Chavez’s cash cow, Venezuela’s state oil company, can’t keep paying the price forever. The long-term capacity of the U.S.’s No. 4 oil supplier to keep pumping crude is under threat because it is spending more on Chavez’s ideological agenda than on badly needed investments, industry analysts say.

ColumbusDispatch