While Venezuela, Brazil and Mexico have addressed poverty by increasing social spending, the types of programs and use of resources have had and will continue to have different effects for the future. Venezuela, relying on revenue from high oil prices, has significantly increased social spending on building homes and clinics. Brazil has addressed education and healthcare to address poverty, while Mexico has focused on stipends to poor families, which are expected to be the most effective in addressing the real causes of poverty. While in the short term these programs provide benefits to the poor, in the long term the failure to meaningfully address the causes of poverty may contribute to continued dissatisfaction with the quality of democracy. Venezuela's state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela has spent more than $3.7 billion over the past year on social and agricultural programs, building medical clinics and hundreds of thousands of homes for the poor. It was able to achieve this by relying solely on the country's burgeoning oil wealth. This ambitious effort to help the poor is an integral part of Chavez's "social revolution," but critics argue that this squandering of oil revenues will not eliminate poverty in the long term. The program is criticized for failing to address the causes of poverty and simply trying to spend the money visibly so as to gain loyalty and support. Furthermore, reliance on an unstable source has the potential to create devastating consequences if the source of wealth fails to provide the income necessary for continued program support. Rather, it has been suggested that the government should invest its earnings, as the volume of production is decreasing, rather than simply spend it on half the paper. Poverty and inequality successfully address two key concerns. for Mexicans. It also has the effect of reducing crime and increasing education, overall benefits to the nation with a government that has successfully met the demands of the people. So while all three countries have made progress on the issue of poverty in the short term, in reality it is Mexico's stipend program and Brazil's similar one that have the potential to truly improve the quality of democracy, while Venezuela's programs financed by oil are vulnerable to devastation and total program failure if oil revenues decline. All in all, addressing the poverty problem satisfies one of the government's main concerns, but whether it will succeed in continuing to alleviate the poverty problem depends on the nature of the program and whether it can have a stable allocation of funds and resources..