Morpheal wrote:
> OLD AGE PENSION HELL AND ONLY A GOVERNMENT CAN SAVE US
An interesting rant, parts of which are close to my heart. It is
worthwhile to consider how the social contract has implicitly changed
since pensions were first introduced. Initially, life expectancy was
lower (or at least hardly higher) than pensionable age, and it is only
in recent decades that we have reached the situation where people expect
to have 20+years in education, at most 40-45 in work (often with
substantial periods between jobs, including childcare and other family
responsibilities) and a further 20 years in comfortable retirement. It
is hardly surprising that the system is starting to creak a little.
The solution seems rather obvious to me: raise retirement age. Indeed
this is already happening, on an official basis in some cases and
unofficially in others (ie OAPs doing a bit of work on the side). Of
course there needs to be some safety net for those who are incapable of
productive work (and I guess their numbers must have increased a fair
bit along with life expectancy) but I don't really see why we should
consider it our birthright to sit around for (in some cases) several
decades after reaching 65 or even 60 in some jobs.
I don't know exactly what the figures show but I would expect that a
gentle staged increase in statutory retirement age, maybe adding one
year to the threshold per 5 elapsed, would go a very long way to
defusing the "pensions timebomb" at a stroke.
James
- probably without an official pension, but being paid in Yen :-)
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