Re: Hurrah we can work forever @ nijam
Don't blame those of my generation if said government has frittered away that money...
I'm not far off the same age as you, so please don't read that I'm stirring inter-generational strife because I don't want to pay. Personally I'm more likely to benefit than lose out from the current flawed system, but I object to the epic incompetence and unfairness of it all, particularly for people currently under 45. So I'm not blaming the population, I'm observing a series of simple facts that most people don't like. The blame sits with clueless civil servants and dishonest politicians, unfortunately they are not rich enough to hold to account to make up the vast deficit on public sector pension obligations (or health and social care costs).
Regarding your comment about frittering away the money, in the context of pensions and related costs, government never collected it in the first place. The state pension is just a simple unfunded Ponzi scheme, with the promises based on the logic that paying for one government's promises is a subsequent government's problem. Even if successive governments had squirreled away everybody's NI into a hypothecated and securely invested fund, the contributions both real and notional that people have been making would be insufficient to pay the pensions and other benefits that people believe they are entitled to, primarily because of fast growing life expectancy. And that would still be true if we calculated that notional contributions included not just NI, but some element of the income tax we all pay.
So coming back to the original comment and article, we need the pensionable age to rise, we need older people to keep working for longer, and we still need higher taxes and see reduced benefits. Things like perhaps paying to see a GP, no NHS dentistry, social care costs offset against high personal wealth levels, hotel charges for hospital in-patients. I don't like those any more than anybody else, but at the moment we have a system where costs are growing significantly faster than the economy as a whole, and government have been spending many tens of billions more than they raise each year for about the last quarter century, and they now owe assorted creditors £2 trillion. Corbyn clearly thinks there's a money tree, but he should go to Greece and see what happens when borrowing gets out of hand. Sadly the twats of the Tory party are no better at economic management, and ultimately somebody will lose out, big time. Even if that somebody were "rich" creditors, in a total loss scenario nobody would then lend to the British government at all, and it would overnight have to cut public spending by at least £50 billion a year, or raise taxes by a similar amount.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
