Bush's Chilean model for Social Security reform STRANDS seniors

[Bluebear]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/business/worldbusiness/27pension.html?oref=login

SANTIAGO, Chile - Nearly 25 years ago, Chile embarked on a sweeping experiment that has since been emulated, in one way or another, in a score of other countries. Rather than finance pensions through a system to which workers, employers and the government all contributed, millions of people began to pay 10 percent of their salaries to private investment accounts that they controlled.

Under the Chilean program - which President Bush has cited as a model for his plans to overhaul Social Security - the promise was that such investments, by helping to spur economic growth and generating higher returns, would deliver monthly pension benefits larger than what the traditional system could offer.

But now that the first generation of workers to depend on the new system is beginning to retire, Chileans are finding that it is falling far short of what was originally advertised under the authoritarian government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

For all the program's success in economic terms, the government continues to direct billions of dollars to a safety net for those whose contributions were not large enough to ensure even a minimum pension approaching $140 a month. Many others - because they earned much of their income in the underground economy, are self-employed, or work only seasonally - remain outside the system altogether. Combined, those groups constitute roughly half the Chilean labor force. Only half of workers are captured by the system.

[Cleita]

1. Is anyone surprised?

I'm not and I once lived in Chile before the reign of Pinochet. It wasn't a paradise then, but Dr. Kissinger's Nazi friend didn't fix anything either.

[Bluebear]

2. And Smirk uses this failed plan as his "model"!

[Bluebear]

3. .

.

[cthrumatrix]

4. details...details