Who’s going to pay our pensions in 20-30years if the UK keeps its birth rate low and also restricts immigration?

Yeah, I meant the pp looks at a tax as optional if they don’t pay it. It’s an odd way to look at it.

There obviously is a limit, the argument is where it lies. From a quality of life point of view, I think a lot of the U.K. has too large a population and people suffer.

?? The comment was about the Education tax being optional.

@FreedomandPeace Ah, what a strange way of looking at it. I’m guessing the pp thinks income tax is optional by never earning any.

Think you need to read about Thomas Malthus. He made the same argument and it never came to pass. Humans are the ultimate resource. We are clever, innovative, generous, and cooperative. We are no where near peak resource. Maybe peak fossil fuel. But technology is making us more capable of feeding people.

we just need to be better at distributing our wealth

The tax hasn’t changed the pp means it’s optional because there’s free state education

we don’t collect the data to know this here, but this is the graph for Denmark. Only western immigrants (recruited for highly skilled jobs, basically) are net contributors. And that is legal immigrants, recruited for jobs, let alone those working illegally and not paying tax

Well said. The mental gymnastics people go through to argue that the paying in part
is only for other people is amazing.

“Not all immigrants are doing low-skilled jobs. NHS hospitals are absolutely full of foreign doctors. Many tradespeople - like plumbers and electricians - are Polish”

But an awful lot of immigrants are either not working AT ALL or in minimum wage jobs like Deliveroo. They are, and always will be, a drain on the system. Once settled, they are followed by family members (parents, grandparents etc) who are also a drain on the system.

The system is like a club. We all pay in and we take out when needed. We can afford to under write some non contributors. But once the balance between those paying in and thos taking out shifts too far in favour of taking out the whole thing collapses.

Yes I agree, the main other option for paying for pensions is to increase taxes. Obviously also delaying the retirement age as many PPs have mentioned will help.

People who arrive here as adults are going to be on average net contributors to government coffers because another country will have paid for their education and healthcare as children. Once they arrive here, they are ready to work and pay taxes.

Not all immigrants are doing low-skilled jobs. NHS hospitals are absolutely full of foreign doctors. Many tradespeople - like plumbers and electricians - are Polish.

Obviously when they get old, immigrants, like anyone else, will be drawing more on the state than at other times of their lives. Same with anyone who gives birth or has school-age children.

What's my suggestion for paying pensions? Well I don't really know, but who's going to pay for the immigrants' pensions when the time comes? Bearing in mind that your expectation is that they will be doing the lowest-paid jobs that British people don't want to do, their tax and NI will be low, so that their contributions will be barely funding their own housing, NHS healthcare and the education of their children on an ongoing basis, let alone contributing to anything else.

Perhaps one solution would be to increase taxes for the most well-off. But that would go down like a lead balloon, wouldn't it? They'll all be wanting to know why they should be paying more out of their incomes in order to fund the riff-raff.

I worked 3 years past state pension age and would have happily continued to pay NI and would have expected my employer to pay their share as well. I'm usually shot down when I suggest this but surely it makes sense for working pensioners to carry on paying in to the pot to help pay for others?

Glad to help.

Excellent, I didn’t know it had been changed. I did think it was a seriously f*cking stupid and embarrassing thing to do, maybe there’s hope for this government yet !!

I mean nobody has to pay the tax. It’s completely optional.

I’m not sure there's ever a good education tax to be honest, but yeah I guess this one ranks low.

The state pension problem isn’t one that needed to be costed for the election period. It’s a looming problem that MPs have been conscious of for years and is slowly being tackled - by moving the state pension age from 60 to 65 (for women) and then to 67/68. No government wants to inflict the pain of it but there’s no choice, it’s becoming more and more unaffordable especially with the triple lock.

WFA is a triviality compared to this!

What "massive" additional taxes did you have to pay?

Remind me again, did VAT go up to 22%? perhaps fuel duty went up? or was it income tax? i'm sure that stayed exactly the same!

Council tax stayed the same as it has done for many years, a max 5% increase.

CGT still below income tax rates and paid by a tiny number of people.

So basically, you weren't affected at all were you but still persist with these scare stories.

1. Birth rates have also fallen in Muslim countries. Iran for one, of many examples is not even at replacement (1.6 per woman). In fact outside of some African countries, falling birth rates is a global phenomenon.

2. Birth rates among immigrant groups tend to align with host populations within a generation.

3. Can you cite a source for “explosive growth in muslim communities in Europe linked to birth rates?”

A tax that 93% won’t have to pay. Sounds like a really shitty “education tax”.

I foresee them building something akin to student halls of residence, to house all the pensioners who don't own their own homes and are too old/ ill/ unable to work. Grimtastic.

I just wanted to point out that, while it is true that much of the world currently has low birth rates (most of Asia outside of the Muslim world at least), recent immigration into the UK has been primarily from Muslim countries, and they tend to have much higher birth rates in the UK as well. This is one of the reasons behind the explosive growth of the Muslim population in Europe. Notably the Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups in the UK have very high birth rates.

And, we are nearly 70, so quite old.

I definitely buy offal! We're fond of liver and kidneys, properly prepared, but I can do that myself.