I have been carping on about how pensions would be cut and the age raised for so long I had begun to bore myself. But today we get the first glimpse of the truth, in the UK at least. Pensions to be raised to 66 a decade earlier. Don't believe it. This is just to get you used to the idea.
Raising to 66 by 2016 does nothing. Raising the age of retirement is the softer option and will therefore be raised much further. I am quite confident you will see the discussion move on to retirement for men at 70 in a short space of time. The discussion will have to move on smartly because it has to be implemented much sooner that 2016. 2014 or 13 is more like it, for a first move to 66 or 67. To be followed by a further move to 70 shortly after. It could come sooner.
Raising retirement age is softer that lowering the pension payments. Lowering payment risks pensioners voting against you. Raising the age only offends the narrow slice of voters who are at retirement only to find it receeeding from them. Those already retired will say nothing. Preferring that others not get a pension, rather than see theirs cut. And those not near retirement will say nothing because they would rather see pensioners suffer the cut rather than the younger face a cut in their unemployment or a tax rise which would hurt them immediately.
So raising the age of retirement, which means the age at which the state has to start shelling out for you, is the no.1 choice. And it is a source of vast savings. Women, who have argued for equality will get it, but might wish they hadn't. They too can look forward to 67 or later for retirement.
This is for the UK. The same will have to happen in every other country. Spain and Portugal and Italy will have a rougher road to travel on pensions.
By the way when I say 'will have to' I don't say this because I think it is a good idea. I think it is a poor choice to be backed into. I also think it will prove unworkable. A teacher can teach at 70. A labourer physically cannot. And the generation of fat guzzling, sugar sucking, chip munching morons that the Fast Food industry has been helping into early ill-health and cripple-hood will definitely not be able to hack it.
The 'have to' comes from the fact that we have and are continuing to ruin our economy on the say so and for the short term benefit of the banks.
Pensions have been a ticking time bomb for more than a decade and should have been dealt with. We have the abject failure of all parts of our political class to thank for the fact that precisely nothing has been done about pensions. There is much we could have done and much we could do. But won't.
Also because of structural unemployment more people won't have the contributions to get a full pension, so will exist on low benefits while waiting to get to that age.
ReplyDeleteI'd forgotten that wrinkle of good news. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteA teacher could teach at 70 but shouldn't. Ceartainly professors should be forced to go at 65 - in my experince, since they changed the law such that they may no longer be forced to retire, promotion has been almost impossible; elderly professors hang on at the top holding the best jobs and sucking down the department's money. Meanwhile young lecturers with families to support cant get off the first pay grade, and get laughed at when they apply for a mortgage. Three years ago i witnessed the ultimate carry-on-campus moment when one former head of department (who refused to retire) arrived at the university one morning to find the department's locks had been changed by the new head of department. Worse - infinetly worse - they teach out-of-date theories using methods from the stone age! Science in the UK is terrible because science students are being taught the science of the 1950's; i once heard one of the refusing retirees say 'nothing of any importance has happend since 1956 so there is no need to inculde any more recient material on the syllabus'. If Thomas Kuhn is to be believed then science only progresses by whole generations of misguided old fuddy duddies dying out and letting a new generation take over.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that politics works the same way - the majority of the public never learn anything after the age of thirty and those over the age of fifty are actively hostile to any improvement in the world, or the conditions of the human race. As such, society only progresses when a generation of backward voters dies out, letting their children's new knowledge take over. With people living longer, and the 'boomers' becoming the largest subset of the population i have zero hope anything intellegent or necessary will be done in the west before 2040 (when the boomers voting empire will atlast be gone).
Please will some one stand up in parliament and propose a bill to make voting manditory between the ages of 18-60, that's the only thing (short of removing the vote from the over 60's) that will give the rest of us a chance against the huge pension-entitlement-brigade. Who, need we be reminded, never payed a fraction of the necessary taxes for the pensions they now demand, and even the puny amount they did pay they then stole back by using the pension schemes as sinks for goverment bonds and thus a fund for more boomer indulgences. Worse the over retirees are plus 50% of the cost of the health service! Western countries are finished - who wants to invest in a country facing this kind of demographic crisis?
Wow cyan, you do hate oldies don't you!
ReplyDeleteHowever, I just dont see how they can square the circle, as it is the younger generation have a pretty high unemployment rate, getting a job when over 50 is nigh well impossible (and this is from someone who did a Science degree at 40+ !), there are limited jobs (I do believe in the zero sum game as well), all in all it is more complex than simply blaming oldsters for hogging all the jobs. Outside academia life is unforgiving and far from a cushy number.
Cyan,
ReplyDeleteIt was Plank, I think, who said Science progresses funeral by funeral. I am horrifed by your reports of professors sayingh nothing new has happened. Such ignorant bigotry is a crime.
I also share some of your dispair over the post war/60's generation. They inherited everything from their parents who had fought a war and built the welfare state, enjoyed the fruits of the longest boom in history, plundered the world's resourses, and are now saying how they can't afford anything for the next generations.
So I am no great fan of the 60's generation or their selfish refusal to change anything. BUT will their children do better? Will they look firther ahead and be less selfish? Will they admit to the challenges facing them and meet them with courage?
I don't believe the West is finished. Not while I am here it's not.
I b
Cyan,
ReplyDeleteYou want to look at the armed forces;
For entrenched thinking, slow promotion and fear of change, they take the biscuit
If our economic system was delivering genuine increases in prosperity then the retirement age should be getting progressively LOWER, not HIGHER. We're supposed to suck it politely until we die though because we get MP3 players and flat panel TVs to play with. The only people winning in this system are the INFLATIONIST PARASITES.
ReplyDelete"Anger is an energy."
ReplyDelete"If our economic system was delivering genuine increases in prosperity then the retirement age should be getting progressively LOWER"
ReplyDeleteThat i can agree with.
A general settlement on pensions should have been worked out years ago. It should have been done in the seventies, probably a switch to bismark-style social insurance. With social-democratic schools, universities and hospitals.Oh and nurseries, that would have lessened population decline. At this stage I dont believe anyone under 50 will ever see a state pension. (sorry to state the blindingly obvious) By they will have reached 65 the pension will have receded to 70, by the time they reach t70 it'll be gone altogether! If that's the situation then they should be honest about it now, because it will take twenty years for people to make other arrangements.
And... I dont believe that our generation will act any better, because i dont believe ANY generation can act with sufficent foresight. People can only understand the world their brains develop in, and their knowledge remains relevant only for a few decades after that. (e.g. climate change is an issue one generation 'gets' as serious and urgent, and another doesn't - the limmits of growth is not concievible to a Fordian generation)
That would not be a problem where it not for the demographics being an inverted pyramid. And for the fact that elections owe 1000 times more to demographics than any other factor - having debates and producing manifestos is a side show, elections are won by having the right demographics. Look at the voting margins of Republican presidents, Nixon 67%, Reagan 59%, GB the second 51%. Is it that nixon was more popular?, did the republican party lose voters?, or did people stop being convinced by their policies? - no, not a bit it, it was the same group of people who voted for each of them, it's just that in-the-mean-time 20% of that demographic group had died. The rest cling on as the what-happened-to-our-america-? crowd: 'their america' being the america of 40 years ago.
The nature of the two party system combines with the increasing inablity of the human mind to adapt to change with aging to chaperone people into demographic-imperial-block-votes that remain resistent to reason, argument, and ablity.
Morning Cyan,
ReplyDeleteRevolutionary, root and branch change doesn't require a majority. They never have. It requires a sufficient minority who come to believe in themselves and to reject the accepted view of what people can and can't do.
In my opinion that's part of the task facing us.