Tuesday, April 26, 2005

How did this slip by the NYT editors?

Wonder of wonders: a columnist for the New York Times wrote an article on Social Security and it includes *gasp* numbers! It makes economic predictions based on Earth-based mathematics! Wow! Don Luskin is beside himself.

Anyway, new columnist John Tierney traveled to Chile to see how their experiment in personal accounts has worked out in “The Proof’s in the Pension”:

Still, you may argue, Chileans may someday long for a system like Social Security if the stock market crashes and takes their pensions down with it. The relative risks of the Chilean and American systems are a question for another column. But I can tell you that Pablo is an economist who appreciates the risks of stocks and has no doubt about where he wants to keep putting his money.
If only we were as fiscally sophisticated as the Chileans. Read the whole thing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

And if the US stock market crashes (I assume here he means a full-bore, long-term-depression-causing meltdown) exactly how would SS pay its bills? Where will the payroll taxes to fund it come from when we have 40% unemployment? Will they print money? Oh, boy...hyperinflation, here we come!
"[In Yugoslavia] between October 1, 1993 and January 24, 1995 prices increased by 5 quadrillion percent. This number is a 5 with 15 zeroes after it."
--Toren