The $100 Trillion Problem: Can America Learn From Chile Before It's Too Late?

Tyler Durden

Jose Pinera provides an Entitlement State 101 lecture, in which Chile's former Labor and Social Security Minister demystifies the U.S.'s $100 trillion unfunded benefits problem. Since Pinera is the man who many years ago privatized Chile's entitlement system, America, and the entire Western system, which for the past century has been relying on unfunded liabilities to provide benefits to the population in the hopes that funding day will never come, may do well to listen to what he has to say. His message: the American way of life, more so than anything else, in which reckless spending, living on credit and not saving for the future, is precisely why the US will be bankrupt very soon. Chile swallowed the bitter pill 30 years ago and after a lot of pain, managed to get out of the hole. Will enabler state #1, America, fail where this allegedly "backward" South American country succeeded? 

Some insight from Pinera:

"$100 trillion is the present value of what Americans will have one way or another to pay, unless they default on their obligation to their citizens. And that is the future, and I am extremely worried because you are like passengers in the Titanic. You see the Titanic is going toward the iceberg of aging populations but populations the feel entitled to all these huge benefits that the politicans have promised the people, but they have not funded the benefits for the future. So how are you going to pay them? That is the big issue, the big domestic problem facing America."

The $100 Trillion Problem: Can America Learn From Chile Before It's Too Late?