A short rant about pensions - please do not adjust your set
OK, so I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my retirement years are going to be spent huddled over a single lump of coal eating leftover catfood - I might as well have buried my pension contributions in a hole in the garden. But when are we as a society going to wake up to the fact that if we want a Scandanavian-style crade-to-grave social system where pensioners don’t freeze to death in winter, the trains run on time and there’s a decent chance of getting treatment before whatever you’ve got kills you, we’re going to have to pay for it?!?
I mean, would you really notice an extra 1p or 2p on the basic rate of income tax - and if you’re earning over £100,000, is it going to be such a problem if there’s a 50% marginal rate? So why do we seem to have boxed ourselves into a situation where we’re stuck with the idea that Taxes Are Bad, but still expect to get the services without paying for them??
(Rant inspired by the latest waffling from Margaret Thatcher Tony Blair - apparently the only way to plug the pensions shortfall is for anyone on incapacity benefits to be boiled down for glue…)
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The basic problem is that we identify more with America than Europe. And in America, they pay lower income tax and we go out there and still see a gorgeous infrastructure, trains that run on time etc. We don’t tend to live there and see that the trains only run on time because there are hardly any of the buggers, health insurance is a joke etc.
But raising 1-2p on income tax won’t help in pensions in the long run, because there’ll be more OAPs than workers.
I couldn’t agree more - we seem to want European standards for US-levels of taxation. Although I’d question whether *overall* disposable US standards of living and disposable income are higher than ours once you factor in the zero level of job security and astronomical cost of health insurance in the US. I suspect that if we suddenly had to pay the £1,000+ per month premiums for healthcare for a typical family, the NHS would suddenly seem like a cost-effective bargain, wrinkles notwithstanding.
Take your point about the demographics - but at the moment we’ve got the worst of both worlds. We’re not saving enough for the point where we’ve got more pensioners than workers, while at the same time we’re running down the social infrastructure of the country because we can’t be bothered to pay for it.
At the risk of sounding like my dad
we’re developing a worrying “I-want-it-now-but-I-don’t-want-to-pay-for-it” approach to life as a nation…