Cristina fernandez presumably hoped that old people in Argentina would be delighted by her announcement on January 28th that public-pension payments would rise in March by 15.8%. But at the weekly meeting in Buenos Aires of the national retirees' association, where elderly folk get together to gripe about how the government is cheating them, attendees overwhelmingly dismissed the president's decision as too little, too late. The government's row with pensioners dates back to the country's 2001-02 economic crash, when a currency devaluation was followed by a surge of inflation. Nestor Kirchner, Ms Fernandez's late husband and predecessor, spent most of the pension agency's scarce funds to increase payments for poor recipients.
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