The problem with the benefit system

I know. The point I was making above is related to how big your company is/how many are working for you.

Telling people to save is fine in principle, but I really think there is a complete lack of acceptance that the vast majority of people can just about afford to live. Being able to save thousands of pounds each year of your working life to build up say a modest £200k pension pot is simply unreachable for most people. I know there are various stats banded about, but most suggest that the average UK family has less than £20k in savings and over a third of all working adults have less than £1k in savings. Either we are all pi$$ing our money up the wall, or living costs make saving untenable for the majority of people in work.

Apparently if it's UC it's having everything given to you but if it's state pension it's a not what you deserve.

NIC is for other people's state pensions.

Feel free to come up with a better solution 👍🏻

Any evidence for the assertion working longer means worse public health?

Where’s the money gonna come from?!

This is all fine but it doesn't really work for people already well into their working lives who have been led to believe they will be getting something back of the State for funding the previous generation. It would need phasing in based on how long people have left working to give a reasonable chance to make new arrangements (I've been paying into a pension since I was 16 so it doesn't impact me much but I suspect there will be a lot of people my age, especially in lower paid jobs, that wouldn't have enough saved away if teh State pension got pulled). The downside of course is that people at the start of their career will need to put away a couple of hundred quid a month when they are already finding it hard to save up money to get a deposit for a house, pay the costs of raising a family etc. and with payments in being percentages those at the lower earning level will end up with less.

The real solution is a greater distribution of wealth. There is no justifiable reason that a company CEO should earn 50x what their lowest paid staff member earns other than pure greed. Pay people more equally for the job they do over their lifetime and they can save, buy houses, spend more and contribute to the economy, and save enough for retirement that they don't have to rely on a state pension. It's pretty basic but people don't actually want to share wealth, if we did there would be a lot less problems with our society in general I suspect. All social ills are created by inequality in some form, it is as simple as that.

The reason they think that way is they've been told all their working life that's what they can expect. They have coughed up for the previous generation on the understanding they will get the same themselves. I agree the system needs to be amended but as with the benefits system as a whole and free at the point of care health I don't know how that can be done fairly. Lets face it, if a few people on a cycling forum could come up with an answer that works then I'm pretty sure that even with the incompetents running teh country something would have already been done. I've previously said I think it should be based on working life not a set age (you shot that one down because graduates). I would agree that reducing expectation of the State providing needs to be phased in along with means testing (means testing would need to be done in such a way that people don't think it isn't worth earning / saving though to prevent something along the lines of the issue raised in the original post on this thread). I just can't see how you can suddenly tell everyone currently working at various stages in their life they have to suddenly get more money saved up before they retire than they were previously expecting.

The solution is a bit of everything. Higher NI, progressively increasing private pension contributions, increasing the retirement age slightly.

The solution is not one of these things in isolation.

Some people seem keen on complaining about when they were born. But you just have to play the cards you are dealt. And it could be worse. At least you aren't wearing camo and following orders to go over the top.

I mean, that is literally what is happening to working age people.

I'm not sure it's that entitled to pay tax all your working life then expect a similar level of pension provision to that which you paid for.

Means testing a public pension feels like it's effectively in danger of being seen to reward those who failed to prepare for retirement.

Your last paragraph has to be a wind up

it's not really a ceo compensation problem, some get paid a lot, arguably too much, but their wealth is a drop in the ocean

over time there's been a huge shift in wealth distribution, fixing it would be good, also difficult to do 'now' as that really implies large scale seizure of assets from, among others, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds etc.

in the uk...

i) relentless transfer of public assets, especially utilities, to private sector created a one-off bubble that's long burst, leaving decades of under investment, loaded with debt, but still paying dividends

ii) with the public piggy bank empty, the idiots added pfi as a toxic cherry on top of the cake

iii) modern business is based upon squeezing every cost out of the bulk of the workforce to benefit the owners, whether public or private, out-sourcing, automating and off-shoring in the process, and at home using benefit-free zero-hours contracts

on the plus side we get loads of chinese tat, delivered same/next day by amazon, and junk food can be delivered to your door in minutes 24x7 (unless you're in the sticks, everywhere there has closed)

on the down side, we have an overall low wage economy in decline, no prospect of real terms wage growth for the majority, low investment, and crumbling infrastructure/services

to be blunt, the majority aren't able to do much more than manual/skilled labour, the brexiter fantasy of "high wage, high skill" economy was never going to fly, it's not how the modern world works

to change wealth distribution, without seizure, those millions need to be productively employed, that means investing in local production, with living wages and benefits, on fair employment contracts, keeping profits local and reinvesting, using tariff barriers to block low-cost imports

of course that means higher prices, less tat, etc., which still will punish the poor/fixed income retirees, but maybe there'd be enough tax revenue to assist them without the country bankrupting itself

trouble is, there's no money and assets have been sold off, successive governments ignored the systemic issues and looked the other way, knowing they could get their snouts into the post-government trough

we're doomed, doomed 😀

That’s a straw argument no one’s said that.

Lots of interesting stuff in here SG! I think your third point is one of the biggest issues to have driven inequality. I run a business and completely understand that the capitalist imperative is too make as much money as possible, but it is completely counter productive to me (unless the goal is just massive personal wealth). I would rather invest in the business and our staff, keep cash in the bank for long term prosperity of the business and sacrifice some of my own gain. I think more of this across the economy would do a lot of good and go some way towards a greater redistribution of wealth.

Seems to me that a lot of people on this forum are doing a dummy run while being paid for it.