Generational Inequality

GreatApe

Any report which looks at just income to determine wealth is just a silly useless report because a very significant part of wealth are gifts and inheritances.

I'm not sure its reasonable to say incomes are lower this generation than the last it could be one of those fake news crap stats interpretation. However I am certain without a doubt that inheritances and gifts are so much more now than a generation or two ago.

So who is better off or will be better off. Someone in the current generation on £20k a year with a £300k inheritance on the way and who has already got a £50k gift for a housing deposit or the generation before him who had to leave home at 16 got no help and received some used furniture and cloths as an inheritance but managed to have a job that paid in real terms £25k??

Just looking at the £25k vs £20k is silly and will paid t a picture completely different to the reality.

Overall I don't think the current generation are worse off they are better off in every way. Anyone who wishes they were born 1960 rather than 1990 is stupid.

MyOnlyPost

mrginge wrote: »

Difficult to expect people to save more for their pension while at the same time handing out more cash to those that don't..

Absolutely agree with this and also can't look at life time earnings to determine who should have saved due to national discrepancies in cost of living. I don't advocate a means tested state pension but fear it is coming.

With long term planning people can be told at the beginning of their working lives rather than the end what to expect. I know some on here have criticised the WASPI campaign but my mother is one of those affected and within the space of a few years her state pension age increased by five and a half years. I agree that something had to be done to equalise retirement age, but it should have been done a lot sooner and phased in more gradually. My mum had full NI contributions before the changes were announced so you could argue she had paid in full for a service and then the supplier had breached the long tem contract on when the service should be supplied.

I have 22 years NI contributions and if the government were to abolish the state pension for instance I would expect a considerable sum in compensation to be paid to my private pension, if however they were to bring in means testing with some years warning I should be able to expect that my banked NI contributions would pay a pro rata pension with the remainder being means tested. If and when such a change occurs nobody who has full NI contributions should be affected in my opinion, it is wrong to change the goalposts after qualification, but they have alreadydone it once.

StevieJ

mrginge wrote: »

Erm. Didn't Osbourne introduce the triple lock in 2010?

You are correct, as a means of sweetening tthe removal of age related allowances.

antrobus

mrginge wrote: »

Erm. Didn't Osbourne introduce the triple lock in 2010?

Brown had a 'double lock' from 2001; the BSP went up by 2.5% or RPI, whichever was the higher.

Osborne introduced the triple lock in 2010; the BSP went up by 2.5% or CPI, or average earnings, whichever was the higher.

It's that 2.5% guaranteed minimum increase that's the most important bit; the rest is just arithmetic. You have to look at the CPI, RPI, and average earnings to see the difference. The National Pensioners Convention states that over the past six years;

On two occasions pensioners got less than they would have done under the pre-triple lock system, on three occasions they got exactly the same and on just one occasion did they get a higher increase.

http://npcuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Triple-Lock-Fact-Sheet.pdf

(Since they have the same numbers as the government, I expect they might be right.)

The HoC briefing paper on the State Pension triple lock (Number CBP-07812, 3 February 2017) does say that the "triple lock has cost more than was originally expected", but also notes that the triple-locked bSP cost £68bn in Great Britain in 2015/16, compared to the £67bn it woould have cost had it only been linked to CPI.

A penny on the income tax gets you £5.5bn, that's real money, £1bn is pocket change.:)

antrobus

Sapphire wrote: »

'Typical pension incomes': I can tell you that there are pensioners in my family whose incomes are nowhere near £35,000 p.a. and under £12,000 p.a. ...

If you read the report you will find that it says that "Inequalities within generations can be just as large as those between generations" and specifically addresses that issue.

antrobus

What the report says is this;

Having been £70 a week lower than typical working-age incomes in 2001-02, typical pensioner households now have incomes that are £20 a week higher than their working-age counterparts, but this is not because pensioners have got more money, but because the generation of people who have become pensioners since then have higher incomes.

Indeed of the 31% rise in "typical gross pensioner incomes (before housing costs)" over the period between 2001-02 and 2014-5,

one-quarter was the product of increased income from employment;
half is accounted for by increases in private pension and investment income;
rest from growth in public benefits, although this was "largely before the introduction of the triple lock – with this source proving an especially major driver of improvements at the lower end of the pensioner income scale

So pensioners now have higher incomes because they have jobs and saved money for their old age.

Isn't that what people are supposed to do?

posh*spice

kabayiri wrote: »

We should work out what is holding back earning opportunities.

That'll be all the unemployed French, Italian and Spanish graduates who have saturated the SE - everybody talks about Polish people and ignore the other 2 million

davomcdave

posh*spice wrote: »

That'll be all the unemployed French, Italian and Spanish graduates who have saturated the SE - everybody talks about Polish people and ignore the other 2 million

That's amazing, unbelievable in fact.

UK unemployment is 1.6 million yet there are 2 million unemployed French, Italian and Spanish people in the South East alone. That means that indigenous British unemployment is a maximum minus 400,000.

I'd love to see a link to your stats so I can understand the economic miracle that means that we now have negative unemployment in Britain.

Thrugelmir

davomcdave wrote: »

A mobile phone is as much a luxury today as a landline was in the 60/70s.

But everybody in a family has a mobile not just one phone to share. A considerable difference in outlay.

bugslet

davomcdave wrote: »

That's amazing, unbelievable in fact.

UK unemployment is 1.6 million yet there are 2 million unemployed French, Italian and Spanish people in the South East alone. That means that indigenous British unemployment is a maximum minus 400,000.

I'd love to see a link to your stats so I can understand the economic miracle that means that we now have negative unemployment in Britain.

I read it that s/he meant the people who were unemployed in France etc, who came here and found work.