The way I see it there are three realistic choices a country can make.
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Raise the pension age. Not very popular with the public as illustrated by protests everywhere this has been mentioned.
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Increased migration. Not very popular with the public as seen by the rise of far right parties in both Europe and outside.
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Lowered living standards. Not very popular because who wants to pay the same taxes but get less out of it?
This isn’t a UK problem. It’s the entire western world. And no, the populist idea of “just have more kids” doesn’t solve it.
Any ideas?
- Tax billionaires and companies the same way you tax the working class. Somehow not a very popular idea with the elite
UK billionaires have total a net worth of about £170 billion. Would it be nice to have some of that? Sure, but it’s less than two years of pension spending (£120 billion, and going up by the minuite).
We can tax the millionaires too, but eventually you get to the upper-middle class who are already paying a 45% marginal tax rate.
A dose or two of socialism might get us from 71 to 69 (nice), but honestly I think we’re all going to have to suffer from the economic mistakes made over the last 14+ years.
Upper middle class is a made-up term to make those in the working class who earn the most think they’re not in the same boat as “the poors”. If everything comes crumbling down, they’ll be waiting in the food lines like the rest of us. Millionaires and billionaires will not have the same problems.
We’ve seen from things like the Panama Papers that the rich are far richer than they’d have you believe. I’m sure they’ll be just fine being taxed a bit more.
Also, £120 billion of pension money is likely to wind up straight back in the pockets of the same billionaires anyway as they own the major companies that pensioners are going to be buying everything from anyway.
Spreading doom and gloom that we’ll just all have to suck it up and suffer the consequences of past decisions is a shite position. Don’t repeat past mistakes of letting the rich off with it, eat the rich, enjoy retirement at a reasonable age, spread socialism.
Ok, then what do you call a professional wage-labourer (“working class”, in the marxist definition) who is nonetheless a millionaire? A high-paid professional on 100k can quite easily become a millionaire in their lifetime. If they are mere workers, same as the rest of us, that just strengthens my argument because a socialist regime would have to tax them less.
On the Panama Papres: double it, triple it. Doesn’t stop eating the rich from not being a panacea, that’s all I’m saying. At the risk of “englightend centrism” there’s a middle-ground between rothbardian economics and utopian thinking.
That is… not how money works. In order to tax the Billionaire wealth (which primarily is the companies they own) you are either forcing them to sell (by taxing them x% of wealth, leaving them without liquid assets to pay the tax) or seizing assets and re-selling. You can’t tax the rich and expect them to stay rich forever by virtue of taxing them.
They just need to redo the tax brackets to account for people earning much more at the top. Currently tops out at 125k but there are people earning millions.
Increases in life expectancy accrue primarily to the better off. Whose longer retirements are being paid for by robbing the poorest of any retirement at all.
Tax the fucking rich.
Option 4: tax the shit out of the rich.
This is the answer to most of the problems in most 1st world countries, but since the rich own all our governments the rest of us get a little less each year.
This is the answer to most of the problems in most 1st world countries
A lot, but not this one. The rich are simply not rich enough to offset the demographic issues we have. In the last decades life expectancy rose months per year and even in America billionaires “only” own some 13k per person. With that you could offset ageing population and life expectancy changes for, two years maybe? It would be little more than a drop in the bucket.
Yeah, it’s not popular but it’s the truth.
I don’t mind taxing the rich more, but that doesn’t solve the problem as you say.
The idea would simply be to stop giving so many taxes cuts to companies.
In tenace we recently raised the retirement age because according to the government there was not enough money, the usual bullshit.
Why bullshit you ask? Because it is the very same government that removed three times as much as what they said was missing from pension funds in taxes on companies. They also reduced taxes on capital gains, to bring it to a lower level as what someone middle class would pay on their salary, part of which goes to finance pensions.
We have the money, we always have, it is just a matter of choosing where to put it. Most government of the West decided to put it in the hands of the few richest.
There is one more choice that could easily improve everyone’s standard of living. Tax the rich. Which isn’t realistic because politicians across all large parties are in the rich people’s pockets and, on top of that, the rich own the media, so they can manipulate public opinion. Not that they would have to do much manipulating, this is a western world problem, everyone has been fed trickle down bullshit propaganda for decades.
this is a western world problem
Not really. Do you think media and politicians aren’t owned by the rich and powerful in other parts of the world?
The trickle down propaganda is a western world problem, because that’s where the ideology of trickle down originated from and therefore has been most prevalent.
Maybe in that particular form but the more general idea that rich and powerful people got there because they deserve to be rich and powerful and if we prevented them from getting rich and powerful it would negatively impact all of society is certainly not an exclusively western idea.
In other news, UK’s so called experts have completely lost their collective minds.
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Isn’t it amazing how we’re supposedly so much richer than we were as a society in the 1950s, when they didn’t have computers, they didn’t have cellphones, they didn’t have jet airplanes or genetic engineering and yet:
- we could afford healthcare for everyone
- we could afford housing for everyone
- we could afford defined benefits pension plans for everyone?
How did 70 years of supposed progress leave us unable to afford the basic necessities of life?
Rich be like: 🖕
1950s, the time of plenty… if you ignore the rationing you mean? Life expectancy of 69 (12 years less). Infant mortality was almost 10 times higher, 30 infants died per 1,000 births vs 3.25 per 1,000.
Healthcare has grown from 3.5% gdp to 9%, more stuff gets treated.
There are double owner occupier housing now. 1953 was about 30%. 1956 is when protected rents ended and rents started to increase massively.
Defined pensions were taxed to death by Brown. They do still exist though (I have one, along with a SIPP). More people contribute to pensions than ever before and the age people stop work is starting to decline.
There is no reason to discuss pensions as long as the super-rich don’t pay taxes. The pension funds and every other social fund could be filled to the brim with even slightly higher taxes and they wouldn’t even notice anything missing. They would stay bloody rich.
We have been getting older and having fewer children since we came down from the trees, and we have always been able to raise standards anyway. The only thing that doesn’t work is 1% of the people taking it all and putting it on a pile and sitting on it like a dragon.
I am tired of the same old discussions, get the money from the people who have more than enough! Don’t let them drag you into discussions like this to point fingers away from themselves towards everyone else. Young vs old is not the fight we need to fight, poor vs fantastillion rich is the fight.
To the Tories, there’s no difference between someone who doesn’t own enough property to live off the passive income and a beast of burden. It is the fate of both to die in harness.
“experts”
In the UK, state pension age would need to be 70 or 71 compared with 66 now, to maintain the status quo of the number of workers per state pensioner.
There isn’t a real problem here, it’s literally just to keep an arbitrary metric stable.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The retirement age will have to rise to 71 for middle-aged workers across the UK, according to research into the impact of growing life expectancy and falling birthrates on the state pension.
“But if you bring preventable ill health into the equation, that would have to increase even more,” added Mayhew, who is also professor of statistics at Bayes Business School and has advised the government on rises to the state pension age multiple times as a senior civil servant and in his current roles.
Jonathan Cribb, associate director and head of retirement at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said that while he did not disagree with a higher pension age, increasing it without addressing other cost-saving measures was not “realistic or equitable”.
He added: “It would disproportionately impact poorer individuals whose ill-health means they have shorter lives, and so who receive pensions for less time.”
The Intergenerational Foundation, an independent thinktank, agreed that the pension age had to rise, but questioned on whose shoulders that cost should fall.
“Increasing the state pension age would be a terrible policy – a really bad way of attempting to make people more productive,” he said.
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