It’s a bad idea for a populist to let the price of tomatoes skyrocket
AP:
Prices of fruit, vegetables and food staples have skyrocketed since the U.N. Security Council imposed limited sanctions on Iran in December for defying a resolution demanding that it halt uranium enrichment, a process that can produce material to fuel nuclear reactors or provide fuel for bombs.
“Some countries don’t have oil and gas. Yet, they run their country and stand on their own. We have so much oil and gas but make useless expenditures work for others and don’t think of our own people’s problems and the price of basic commodities go higher and higher every day,” [Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali] Montazeri said…
During Ahmadinejad’s speech Sunday to present the budget to parliament, he said prices of staples such as tomatoes were lower than some people claimed and told people to buy from his neighborhood, not high-priced shops elsewhere. Ahmadinejad was elected last year on a populist agenda promising to bring oil revenues to every family, eradicate poverty and tackle unemployment. And he has faced increasingly fierce criticism in recent weeks for his failure to meet those promises…
Ahmadinejad’s lying and nonsense-talk on economic matters seems to be a serious misstep.