While there are many valid points in this piece, we need to not get blinded by thinking the state pension is anything more than a minimum living standard, even with the triple lock.
The full state pension is 203.85 quid a week.
For those who rely on it, it’s fuck all, which is also why housing benefit, etc, exists.
Wealthy boomers are not wealthy because of the state pension. They are wealthy due to a massive wealth transfer due, almost entirely, to a massive house price boom as well as having interest only endowment mortgages.
Poor pensionsers still exist, and they still live in poverty.
The issue is the state pension was raided in the 1980’s to allow for reduced taxes and so now an increasingly large chunk of the national budget goes on state pensions.
If you factor in the majority of the NHS budget goes on geriatric care or elder social care you end up with more than 50% of the annual budget is to support the elderly.
Its not sustainable.
I think the easiest approach would be to means test the state pension by using tax thresholds. If your household income (excluding state pension) exceeds the free tax threshold (£12,500) then you don’t qualify for a state pension.
Ideally we would increase minimum wage, the tax thresholds and state pension to align with the living wage foundation recommendations.
If your household income (excluding state pension) exceeds the free tax threshold (£12,500) then you don’t qualify for a state pension.
This is laughably cruel, and barely 2k a year above the state pension. In what reality is 12k a year anything other than poverty?
If this is funded via pension savings, you need something in the region of 250-300k to either buy an annuity or have a safe withdrawal rate to have an income of 12k a year.
Assuming a 4% average rate of growth - after charges and inflation - from your 18th birthday until retirement at 67, you need to be contributing the equivalent of 167 quid in today’s money, every month, for 49 years, to get that 300k. That may not sound like a lot, but keep in mind a few things:
- the vast majority - 200k - of that value comes from compounded growth, not contributions, making you extra vulnerable to underperformance
- what and when people can afford to save heavily depends on their circumstances, which change throughout their lives. If you went to uni and started contributing at 23 instead of 18, you’d lose 50k just in lost compound effects. Same applies to stopping work to have kids, to support an ill relative, etc.
- according to this recent times article the average pension pot is approx 37k total, so the vast majority of people are no where near close saving even this seemingly low figure. 37k gets you whopping income of ~100 quid a month.
As you say further up, the country spends considerable sums on the elderly when you include the NHS, etc. That figure is not going to decrease if even more people are in poverty. Health costs have this annoying habit of getting higher the closer to death you are, and accelerating that ain’t the best idea.
Throwing in the towel just because it’s expensive is not the answer.
Culture wars, culture wars, culture wars, culture wars, culture wars, culture wars, culture wars. Sorry, its an add on I have when Tory BS gets pushed about.
The Reason kids are poorer now is because you are not getting paid enough. This is something that has developed in the last 13 years. Mean wages were rising until the Tories got in. Join a union, and make sure you vote at the next election to get these scumbags out.
As for the NHS cost we pay less than a fair few comparable countries and get a very bad deal for what we do pay. A lot of the NHS treatment is privatised now, so ofc it is costing a lot more while getting less in return. It would be cheaper if we did the job with the people we trained up ourselves. Strangely this does not happen anymore. The Tories have placed a lot of private healthcare providers on the boards for budgets in hospitals around the country. It is like letting the fox babysit the chickens.
The issue is the state pension was raided in the 1980’s to allow for reduced taxes and so now an increasingly large chunk of the national budget goes on state pensions.
Where are you getting this from?
If you factor in the majority of the NHS budget goes on geriatric care or elder social care you end up with more than 50% of the annual budget is to support the elderly.
You need to show some proof of this BS. It simply is not true.
Means-tested benefits are an extremely expensive way to be cruel solely to save the rich a few pennies on their taxes. Ordinarily-incomed people already pay a far greater proportion of their income in National Insurance, and work longer because the life expectancy of the rich has gone up, and now you want to take it away if they’re not far enough below the poverty level without it?
You have not thought this through.
Health care, education and welfare are the closest things the state gets to free money. By spending on those things in particular, they increase tax receipts and reduce expenses in other areas. The only reason to discourage spending in those areas is ideological, not practical. This is well known - Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz (both Nobel prize winners for economics) have outright stated this fact:
“Education and healthcare are investments in human capital that pay off in the long run in terms of higher productivity and a healthier, more prosperous society.” - Paul Krugman
“Investing in education, healthcare, and social safety nets is not just a moral imperative; it is also an economic necessity for creating a more equitable and productive society.” - Joseph Stiglitz
This isn’t even bringing countercyclical spending into it - basically, the government is INTENTIONALLY damaging the economy to control and manipulate the working class.
Stop spreading disinformation. Join a union. Get involved in mutual aid. Voting is not the answer.
It’s not like retirees are bathing in cash either. It’s just that when plutocratic corporations decide to raise prices at the same time and governments fail to tax them, the system reacts by raising interest rates and fucking the same people over whom it previously forced into debt.
Grandma is just not as fucked, she’s not being stolen from as much, she only has to contend with inflation. The economy is still mostly growing. It’s just that the few people at the top decided that workers getting a bigger slice of the pie after COVID was not how it’s going to be and fucked up the economy.
If you want to know who made it so that you can barely afford to live, don’t look at Grandma, look at the owners of megacorps who buy these articles that make you blame Grandma or people with different skin colors, or men or women or anyone but the few hundred people who actually run the system.
Well my boomer parents own their homes that they bought in the 90s and have public pensions with inflation increases. They can sell their home at today’s prices and buy a smaller one and leave the deal with a bunch of cash in hand and still have a paid for house.
Benefit from the problem ≠ root cause of problem.
This is absolute divisive garbage. Baby boomers aren’t to blame for inflation. The ruling elite who have been looting the planet and robbing us all blind are to blame. Them, and only them. Solidarity across the whole working class, always.
The article doesn’t say boomers are to blame tho
it’s class
it’s always class
My mom is a baby boomer and she’s far, far, away from sitting pretty financially.
I work with boomers that were given everything, house with the job or a council house and the right to buy, final salary pensions, free education, free prescriptions, publicly owned utilities, a path to progress up the pay scale and they voted it all away when it was my generations turn to benefit.
Plenty of money for their generation, but now it’s our turn and suddenly the money is gone. This is the generation that struts about telling us that we don’t know how good we have it, sitting in their paid off houses that cost 3-5x the average salary whilst we pay £1000pm to the slumlord, triple locked pensions whilst we suffer real term pay cuts.
There’s never been a greedier, more selfish, entitled generation than the boomers. The first generation in history to leave the world worse off than when they inherited it.
Fuck them.
They showed some graphs on newsnight on who has benefited from welfare provisions post ww2 and there has been a huge drop off from boomers and Gen X to millenials
I’m Gen X and benefitted hugely from university fee support, student grants (although these were coming to an end and I also had loans), unemployment benefits, back to work incentives and schemes, and the availability of social housing (I’m still in my housing association flat now) back in the 90s. It’s not like being on the dole back then was amazing, but fuck me it wasn’t as brutal as the current system which is intentionally cruel. And the fact that young people now have to take on huge debt to go to university, and have virtually no hope of getting an affordable rented home through social housing, is just appalling. These things are so crucial to getting a chance to start off in life. Each generation seems to be getting fucked over harder than the one before.
