Ted Cruz: “In 1950, you had the United States, you had Switzerland, you…”

“I'll give you an amazing statistic. Do you know where Venezuela ranked in the world in terms of GDP per capita in the year 1950? You got me number four. Wow. Number four. In 1950, you had the United States, you had Switzerland, you had New Zealand, and Venezuela was number four [in GDP per capita]. And what happened is first Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro, both communists, came in, utterly destroyed the economy, took what was a rich, prosperous country and drove the economy into the gutter.” (02:25–02:32)

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.