Billmon actually entitles his latest post "Newspeak," but I don't want to plagerize. Check it out, then head over to this New York Times article about the wonders of
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.
Even many middle-class workers who contributed regularly are finding that their private accounts - burdened with hidden fees that may have soaked up as much as a third of their original investment - are failing to deliver as much in benefits as they would have received if they had stayed in the old system.
The article and accompanying graphic note that Chile's pension plan still accounts for a greater percentage of government spending than does Social Security here in the US.
So, the pension privatization plan in Chile is not at all dissimilar to Operation Go Cheney Ourselves in Iraq--it failed to solve a non-existant problem, but managed to create several new ones. No wonder Bush considers it a model. He understands how it works.
As for the rest of us--well, why can't we just learn to appreciate Newspeak?
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