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- cross-posted to:
- uk_politics@feddit.uk
- europe@feddit.de
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At what point do we have to have a serious conversation about just what sort of work we can expect a 70 year old to be able to do?
It’s all well and good raising the retirement age, but eventually you’ll get to a point where you’ve got people who are simply unemployable because of their age.
deleted by creator
immigration is just a bandaid in a collapsing dam scenario. what happens to the current uk citizens(its not happening only in the uk, its a developed world problem) will happen to the new immigrants. as their living standards increase they’ll have less children and we’ll get back to the same problem. not enough new meat for the grinder.
the system needs a foundational reconstruction not patching the roof.
deleted by creator
immigration just to add new meat for the grinder will just increase social divisions, because the cause of the problem will not be dealt with. the same effect can be achieved by demanding a better wealth redistribution by increasing wages and taxing the shit out of the wealthy.
i agree with you, sane immigration policies could also buy time to achieve the needed restructuring of our current system. but there is also a problem about immigration that most don’t take into account. the effect it has on countries where that immigration originates. brain drain is a real problem, if we drain countries from people that are willing to work hard those countries will never develop. the wealth and work redistribution needs to be on a global scale.
Free childcare would also help. And actually making this country a good place to have children. The main reason people don’t want children is economic.
deleted by creator
Yeah. Literally every reason is fixable.
The are approximately infinite ways to solve this “problem”, starting with how you even define it. If it’s unsustainable at current levels, what does sustainable mean? Is the time period this year, fifty years, a thousand? What’s the gap? Does it include administration costs, or just the payments?
Once you define what the question is, you can start to answer it. We could increase immigration (very good point btw). We could raise taxes (if so, which tax? Corporation? National insurance? If so - employer or employee contributions?). We could raise interest rates. We could remove the triple lock. We could just murder everyone over 75. We could do a mix of everything - raise taxes a bit and only murder the over 80s.
How you answer the question depends a bit on facts and a lot on ideology. The fact that this article takes one potential solution and declares it THE ONLY solution tells you a lot about their ideology.
You joke about murdering old people, but we do need to stop keeping them alive in states we wouldn’t keep an animal in. We spend a fortune on pointless end of life care with no chance of quality of life. Proper assisted suicide would greatly help the issue. Let them choose to go gracefully.
First, immigration is currently calibrated FAR in excess of any demographic gaps. The population is growing rapidly. If the premise were to plug demographic holes, we wouldn’t need nearly this many people.
Second, if the premise were to alleviate demographic issues at the young end of the pyramid, then immigration policies would block any applications for those over 30, or at least heavily bias the young. They don’t.
There is exactly one reason immigration has been calibrated so high, and with such little care for the skills and qualities of the applicants: to suppress wages and working conditions. It’s the same playbook all over the West.
Why fuck around, you get your pension when you die
I hope AI comes online and our robotic overlords are more caring than our public school boy overlords.
The robotic, having been trained at the whim of the public schoolboy, but now lacking the need to avoid such scant societal pressure which sometime feigns to temper the worst excesses, will of course be more caring… to consolidate power & wealth.
My hope is that they somehow neglect to weave their cruel systems into the same servers upon which the distribution of such essentials as water, food & medicine rely.
yeah your AI overlords were trained by the internet, so I’d not put any money on it.
You guys should eat the rich, instead.
Can we do a france
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.
The original article contains 825 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I love how the powers that be are like “this is a hard problem”. No it fucking ain’t. Look east, towards Denmark; one of the strongest, wealthiest societies on the planet, literally running a state surplus every year, with the happiest citizens on the planet.
Just do what Denmark does. Copy-paste.
A question for Brits, from someone in the US who knows nothing about your history or politics: do you have an analogue for the Baby Boomer phenomenon that we have in the states, with an aging population who “got theirs” and actively works to prevent the younger generations from receiving the same opportunities they had, with similar political leanings? It seems to me like you might not since you have the NHS and other social safety nets that give me the perception that as a whole, you care more about each other, but I’m guessing it’s not that simple? I know I could just Wiki it and I will, but first I would like to hear some perspectives from people who actually live there.
It’s basically the same yeah. Our parents bought their first homes for a fraction of what they go for now. Extortionate rent, mortgage payments (if you manage to get property), bills, transport etc keep the young poor unless you were born wealthy enough to get a big leg up and/or inherit.
Not a Brit, just living in the UK, but yes, we have Boomers. The safety nets are not that good and steadily declining, but not everyone of Boomer age is ok with that.
I don’t think it’s even as simple in the states. This whole business of monolithic ‘generations’ with homogeneous economic prospects and political beliefs needs to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. It’s just another specious example of divisive tribalism that seems to infect so much of public discourse.
