Moreover, Pi era pointed out that the investment thus stimulated resulted in a doubling of the country's economic growth rate, a tripling of the Chilean savings rate and increased job creation. Under the Chilean system, each employer deposits 10 percent of a worker's income in a private account that belongs to the worker. He or she then selects a private pension administration company to manage the money, and if the results are unsatisfactory, the worker can switch companies at any time. These companies are subject to government regulation in order to guarantee diversified, low-risk portfolios and also to prevent theft and fraud, but workers are not told which companies they must invest in. Workers were offered the choice of staying with the old system or switching to the new one and, in either case, were guaranteed the level of benefits established under the old system.
Social security is no longer a political conflict.
A person's retirement income will depend on his own work and on the success of the economy, not on the government or on the pressures brought by special interest groups. Preschool programs provide no lasting benefits to disadvantaged children, and middle-class children gain little if anything from preschool, the study finds. In fact, studies show that any initial gains the children make disappear entirely within a few years of exiting the programs. Olsen cites the Head Start program, which was launched more than 30 years ago as the child-centered component of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, as the closest current counterpart to the proposed public preschools. The government's own investigative arm, the General Accounting Office, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the program, both have found that Head Start has no lasting impact on the cognitive or socioemotional test scores of enrollees.