The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid

The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid: "The new op-ed columnist at the New York Times, John Tierney, finally engages the Social Security debate -- and it's a whopper. After an endless parade of lies from Paul Krugman about how bad reform with personal accounts has been in Chile (for example, this), Tierney actually got on a plane and checked it out himself (Krugman, of course, never leaves his office in Princeton; he gets all the facts he needs from radical leftist websites). Here's what Tierney discovered, upon conferring with a Chilean pal Pablo:



After comparing our relative payments to our pension systems (since salaries are higher in America, I had contributed more), we extrapolated what would have happened if I'd put my money into Pablo's mutual fund instead of the Social Security trust fund. We came up with three projections for my old age, each one offering a pension that, like Social Security's, would be indexed to compensate for inflation:



(1) Retire in 10 years, at age 62, with an annual pension of $55,000. That would be more than triple the $18,000 I can expect from Social Security at that age.



(2) Retire at age 65 with an annual pension of $70,000. That would be almost triple the $25,000 pension promised by Social Security starting a year later, at age 66.



(3)Retire at age 65 with an annual pension of $53,000 and a one-time cash payment of $223,000.



You may suspect that Pablo has prospered only because he's a sophisticated investor, but he simply put his money into one of the most popular mutual funds.



Welcome to the fight, John!"