Seriously. Economically, they have the third best country in the Americas (both North and South, yes I'm reluctantly giving #2 to Canadistan) and they want to ruin it with leftism simply because they want MORE? Did they learn nothing from the General's economic miracle or Venezuela?
17 yrs of CIA backed Pinochet and you're surprised Chile's left leaning? I suggest you pick up a book. Who knows, you may learn there are socialist success stories in Scandinavia and shit.
Are you retarded genetically from your parents or not know how to Google that the cost of living in Chile has increased substantially over the last few years?
It is largely offhandedly unaffordable increases on the metro etc. triggered it but it was coming a while. In the US the rich-poor gap is easier to handle as people have or believe that they have options. Can't afford one state, move to another buddy! etc. until you make it or are homeless and nobody has to care about a total loser. Plus there is always the military for the young, in actual fact a giant socialist jobs training program. It is easy to get rich in the US even for a fairly dull person and so easy to motivate yourself with often big money for your time (for the slightly smarter few). My cousin saved around 160k for college in three years by starting a mobile knife sharpening business as an example. Long hours and hustle is all, no great talent required. In other countries restaurants sharpen their own damn knives. But when you are in the place in a country with the greatest potential and you can't live, no crumbs to gather, riots happen. You can be sure the just join the military as a last ditch option is not practical in Chile as most other countries don't spend such a huge amount of their GDP vs Exports on the military socialist jobs program. That in mind, you may note that the actually most stable democracy (no coups, continuous democracy despite the rebels) in South America is actually Colombia (surprise) which spends way more than other countries on jobs for the boys in green. A huge boon to the poor and middle class with kids. If I recall around 75% of the US Army's recruits are from families from neighbourhoods where the average income is under $65,000. Don't underestimate huge gobs of capital coming in and socialist programs properly applied in a capitalist context and doled out by the rich to the poor. This stops genuine socialism taking control of the government (which does not work). It is when the rich get too greedy and forget their role in providing some glimmer of hope and opportunity to the poor, things turn bad.
1. The metro fare increase was modest. 2. Crumbs are not in the equation in Chile. Poverty is low. And it's largely middle-class.
Modest? I'll have to check the numbers later on. I live in South America (half the time) and speak some Spanish, the wife is a native speaker with a PhD in a related field and that is how she explained it to me in part. Not what our news was saying either, plenty of unhappy faces talking about the unaffordability of the last increase. Do you have the numbers handy?
Had a look. "This all started after a 3.75 percent fare hike was announced for the public transit system. It was 30 Chilean pesos, less than 5 U.S. cents, but an amount that matters for low-income families who tend to spend between 13 and 28 percent of their budgets on transportation, depending how you calculate it. Santiago’s Metro system is already one of the most expensive in Latin America, and had seen an increase in fares of almost 100 percent in 12 years. Some workers who start their journeys at dawn to cross the city weren’t pleased with a recent comment by Minister of Economy Juan Andrés Fontaine:“If you wake up earlier, you can have the benefit of the lower fare.” " It is all relative to your budget and with those figures you can see, haughty remarks like that to get up (several hours early perhaps) for their shift... not a good idea. Easy to take that and turn it into protests by opposition.
Indeed, as with Argentina, pennies matter. Colombia maintains a very strict relationship between public transport costs and the national monthly minimum wage to avoid exactly the complaint in Chile. Every year inflation is accounted for carefully and how it affects the lower "strata", in the six levels. https://www.colture.co/bogota/tips/to-live/strata-system-in-colombia/ The wife is out so I'd ask her does Chile have anything similar to the Colombian strata system but whether it does or not, it seems they went too far.
It's more of success in Capitalism... The Myth of Nordic Socialism By Rainer Zitelmann April 3, 2019 9:00 am ET Polls tell us that 20-somethings today feel better about socialism then they do about capitalism. Among those reclaiming the term are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. and Bernie Sanders in the U.S. To them, socialism doesn’t mean a state-controlled system like the one we saw in the old Soviet Union, but the dream of a “democratic socialism” based on the Nordic model. But their dream is based on a big misunderstanding. Although there are areas—especially in taxes and labor market regulation—where socialist elements still exist in the Nordics, the region is by no means socialist today. In fact, according to the Heritage Foundation’s index of economic freedom, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark rank among the 30 most capitalist countries in the world. The image of the Nordic countries as strongholds of socialism is outdated, harking back to the 1970s and 1980s. To see how things have changed, let’s take a closer look at one: Sweden. In the late 1960s, Sweden’s government spending was in the same ballpark as other OECD states. This changed starting in the late 1960s. Between 1965 and 1975, the number of civil servants grew from 700,000 to 1.2 million, alongside increasing government intervention in economic affairs and the creation of a number of new regulatory authorities. Between 1970 and 1984, the public sector absorbed the entire growth of the Swedish workforce, with the largest number of new jobs created in social services. In 1960, for every 100 “market-financed” Swedes (i.e. those who derived their income predominantly from private enterprise), there were 38 who were “tax-financed” (i.e. dependent on the public sector for their income, whether as civil servants or as recipients of payments from the state). Thirty years later, that number had risen to 151—in other words, there were significantly more people living off of the state than paying into the system. This reflects Sweden’s move away from a capitalist free-market economy to a socialist model. This damaged the Swedish economy and resulted in prominent entrepreneurs leaving the country in frustration. IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, for example, moved to Denmark in 1974 and later to Switzerland. The economic situation in Sweden deteriorated as a direct result of extreme labor market regulation and the constant expansion of the role of the state, which led to massive dissatisfaction among the population. Pushback against these socialist ideas gathered momentum, and by the 1990s there was a comprehensive counter-movement that—without fundamentally questioning the Swedish model of high taxes and comprehensive welfare benefits—nevertheless eliminated many of its excesses. A major tax reform in 1990/91 slashed corporate taxes from 57% to 30%. Income from shares was exempted from taxation, while capital gains from shares were taxed at only 12.5%. The top marginal income-tax rate was set at around 50%, a reduction by 24 to 27 percentage points for the majority of the workforce. The proportion of earners taxed at a marginal rate of over 50% dropped from over half to only 17% paying income tax to the central government. The reforms continued over the following years: in 2004, the estate tax of up to 30% was scrapped. Today, there is no estate tax in Sweden. The abolition of the wealth tax, which had already been cut, came into effect retroactively as of 1 January 2007. The corporate tax rate continued to decline, getting cut from 30% to 26.3% in 2009 and to 22% in 2013. Property tax rates were also cut substantially. Between 1993 and 2000, social spending dropped from 22.2% to 16.9% of GDP, economic subsidies from 8.7% to 1.8% and public-sector payroll costs from 18.2% to 15.6%. These changes have resulted in a drastic decline in equality. Sweden’s Gini coefficient, which measures income distribution, grew by around 30% between the mid-1980s and the late 2000s. Only New Zealand recorded a similar growth in inequality during the same period. Although contemporary Sweden remains a traditional welfare state in some respects (e.g. it has comparatively high tax rates), successive governments since the early 1990s have consistently chosen more freedom over more equality, more market over more state. Following the obvious failure of the socialist experiment, the balance between capitalism and socialism has shifted toward capitalism. The conclusion: Why should countries like the United Kingdom or the U.S. make the same mistake as the Swedes did in the 1970s? Sweden’s “democratic socialism” with high taxes, redistribution and high state regulation has failed, and the young people who are today enthusiastic about the ideas of Bernie Sanders should draw lessons from the experiences of Sweden and other Nordic countries. Dr. Rainer Zitelmann, historian and sociologist, is the author of the recently published book The Power of Capitalism. 10 Show comments
The ‘risk to democracy’ in Chile isn’t from protesters. It’s from Piñera and the 1% Protest criminalised, direct action equated with terrorism: it’s starting to feel like the bad old days of Pinochet. 24 Oct 2019 “We’re at war against a powerful enemy,” declared President Sebastián Piñera live on Sunday night TV from the Chilean army headquarters. “Democracy not only has the right but the duty to defend itself using all instruments … and the rule of law to fight those who would destroy it.” You may be forgiven for thinking Chilean democracy is besieged by some terrifying force: a foreign army, or even an invader from outer space. Nothing could be further from the truth. Piñera’s statement is doublethink: a lie travelling the world while truth is still putting on its boots. Piñera then did what they all do – the Trumps, the Bolsonaros, the Johnsons of this world. He stamped his authority But who is the enemy Piñera has gone to war with? One of his government’s own making – namely, the poorer people of Chile. This is the country that is the ground-zero for the neoliberal economic model now in crisis all over the world. From Canada and the United States to Chile and Argentina, the fire this time in the Americas and elsewhere is being fanned by the few. They’ve benefited the most from an economic model that consists of squeezing the many. And now, having nothing else to lose but their bullshit jobs and half-lives, the dispossessed are rising up like an army. The Chilean people have been robbed of everything. Health, education, water, transport, all basic services have been privatised. Hope has been privatised. What else is there to do? Protest peacefully? Done that. More: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/24/democracy-chile-protesters-pinera-pinochet