State pensions should be slashed

Tancred

nashly wrote: »

And don't forget a lot of them are the boomers that got this country into high debt as well with extortionate house price rises and easy credit, I think it's time they paid back society and be ashamed as well for what they have done.

Ashamed? Of what? House prices are high because demand exceeds supply - what on earth has that got to do with baby boomers? We simply need to build more houses, and that is the fault of the government.

DaveTheMus

remember reading once that an average earners NI contributions is only enough to pay for their first 2 years of state pension...after that they are benefit claimants..................people forget or ignore that when the state-pension was introduced the age a man retired was 65 and the average life expectancy for said man was 66.............

Tancred

Looks like this Nashly is some 22 year old jobless chav who has rolled into the forum from his PC in his bedsit or squat in Middlesbrough or some other sh*thole. Maybe his dad didn't hug him enough, but frankly I couldn't care less - I hold him in the coldest contempt. This is all he deserves.

Compared to France, Germany, Italy and various other western European countries, the UK state pension is already derisory. This has been government policy since Thatcher became PM in 1979, as she wanted the burden of retirement benefits to be shifted away from the state and on the individual. Of course this is all very well, but it has left people at the mercy of employer pensions which have steadily deteriorated over the last three decades. The state pension is not only necessary and desirable but absolutely essential - and it should be more than a basic safety net for the simple reason that many people will never have managed to build up a decent state pension by the time they retire; now more than ever, given the demise of final salary pensions. Infact, what I would suggest is not only carrying on with the 'triple lock', but making the state pension non-taxable so that it is disregarded for tax purposes. This would then be offset by higher taxation on private or employer pensions. The measure would protect the poorest pensioners while ensuring that those richer pensioners who can afford to pay more tax do so.

Tancred

DaveTheMus wrote: »

remember reading once that an average earners NI contributions is only enough to pay for their first 2 years of state pension...after that they are benefit claimants..................people forget or ignore that when the state-pension was introduced the age a man retired was 65 and the average life expectancy for said man was 66.............

So what? We are in 2014 not in 1914 now. The state pension is an entitlement, not a benefit. How it is financed is not relevant.

DaveTheMus

Tancred wrote: »

So what? We are in 2014 not in 1914 now. The state pension is an entitlement, not a benefit. How it is financed is not relevant.

exactly right.....it's not 1914........so why have a system devised in a different time under the rules of the day applied today?

Tancred

jamesd wrote: »

NI is part of revenue but since it can't be used for general spending it's not quite the same as a tax and the money doesn't just go into the Treasury.

Doing something like making it part of income tax would have lots of hard to deal with effects, like a 50% increase in income tax on pensioners and the unemployed. Should pensioners pay for unemployment insurance, say, which they don't at present because they don't pay NI. But they also don't pay the NI portion of NHS funding and on average they are higher users of the NHS. There's also a useful social value in knowing that it is being specifically taken for a range of contributor national insurance based schemes, not just general tax.

There are several methods to control the state expenditure on pensions - I've already come up with ideas in numerous other posts, so I won't repeat myself ad infinitum.
The key issue is to ensure that everyone has enough to live on adequately in retirement. Public sector schemes to finance huge pensions for doctors, judges, senior administrators and military officers are simply not sustainable - they need to be scrapped. And the 40% tax threshold should bite much further down the income scale for pensioners, given that they (quite rightly) do not pay NI contributions.

DaveTheMus

Tancred wrote: »

How it is financed is not relevant.

it's totally relevant when someone states 'I paid my stamp all my days' implying that they're getting their own money back....when in fact if they're over 68 they're usually getting someone elses money back

Tancred

DaveTheMus wrote: »

exactly right.....it's not 1914........so why have a system devised in a different time under the rules of the day applied today?

What is your point exactly? The state pension was never linked to life expectancy until very recently. Do you honestly expect the state pension to be paid for a couple of years only?

Tancred

DaveTheMus wrote: »

it's totally relevant when someone states 'I paid my stamp all my days' implying that they're getting their own money back....when in fact if they're over 68 they're usually getting someone elses money back

You are not making any sense. We all pay tax for over 40 years and we all should get something in return - this is the logic of the welfare state. Exactly how much we pay and for how long is not necessarily the point - this isn't an actuarial exercise. It's a moral issue.
You are concerned about funding? There are lots of ways to cut government expenditure without needing to touch the state pension. The NHS is a huge bill for taxpayer - maybe that needs to be reformed. Why the obsession with the state pension?

DaveTheMus

Tancred wrote: »

What is your point exactly? The state pension was never linked to life expectancy until very recently. Do you honestly expect the state pension to be paid for a couple of years only?

I don't know if you're deliberately being obtuse so I'll try and expand on my point......when the state pension was introduced retirement age was 65, life expectancy was 66....we can take that information and assume that, on average, men would draw their pension for under 2 years before they died....the people that introduced the pension would have known this and being intelligent people would have tailored the pension to suit these circumstances. Had life expectancy been 86 instead of 66, I'm sure that they would have tailored the pension to suit those very different circumstances....I'm saying that pensions are unsustainable and the way it's done has to change because the circumstances have changed.

People don't wake up one day and retire without knowing long in advance that it's going to happen, I'm 31, I know I'll retire one day and I'm saving and investing for it already........if someone doesn't have the foresight to make provisions then more fool them.