President Gustavo Petro denied the statements of his recently appointed president of Colpensiones, Jaime Dussan, who stated in a press conference that after the pension reform proposed by the Government, the savings of the 6.7 million members of that public entity will be used to invest in infrastructure works such as the proposed train from Buenaventura to Barranquilla. “It is not true that the savings that the government makes from its transfers to Colpensiones today will be spent tomorrow, with the reform, on infrastructure,” he said Monday on his Twitter account.
The president explained that the pension reform will be carried out and that it seeks that a greater part of what Colombians contribute goes to the public entity. Although he did not say so explicitly, that reflects the idea of the so-called pillar system that he has championed since the campaign, in which contributions for salaries of up to four minimum wages would go to her, and the additional ones would go to the funds. private. Thus, the State and private companies would stop competing and the two current regimes would be unified into one.
Among other effects, this would lead the State to stop sending the 18.4 billion pesos that today happens to Colpensiones a year so that it pays the pension allowances of 1.7 million Colombians. As the public fund would receive resources that today enter the pension funds, the State would release those resources for other purposes, as explained by the president.
“The budget savings that are achieved with the reform and that do not come from contributors’ money but from the Budget National it will be spent on the pension bonus of half the minimum wage for the three million older adults who are now outside the pension system”, explained Petro.
In addition, he stated that in the first two years of the reform he would dedicate half of the budget savings to reduce the fiscal deficit. With that, he affirms, he would lower the costs of the debt and would achieve “a second budgetary saving”, which would be the one destined to invest in infrastructure.
Dussan, who took office earlier this month after resigning as secretary general of the traditional left-wing Polo Democratico party, has been a critic of private funds and an advocate of reform. But his recent statements touched on a delicate point, that of the destination of the money that the contributors have saved in Colpensiones, which Petro clarified in the campaign that he would not use for purposes other than paying pensions.
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Dussan affirmed “we are going to invest the savings resources we have in the social sphere. For example, we could think that infrastructure works announced by the president such as the train that we are going to take from Buenaventura to Barranquilla”. With that, he left it in the air that what he had already saved would be used.
That drew criticism from government allies. For example, the president of the Senate, Roy Barreras, said, “The high officials of the State help the President @petrogustavo if they follow its clear guidelines instead of distorting them. They are not loose wheels. Do more and talk less.” His colleague in the Chamber, David Racero, said something similar
https://twitter.com/DavidRacero/status/1607392175372771328
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