To be angry with people who describe the old age pension as a "benefit"?

Damien Talks Money did a video about this recently.

You are right that IF the money had been invested, it would have been worth more, but National Insurance doesn't just cover pensions and it was never saved/invested.
Those who have paid in for the last few decades find themselves in the horrible position of having paid for other people to retire at 60 and have a triple locked pension, while they are treated as benefit scroungers by the generation they believed would do what they did.

It won't help those of us who paid for all these years in good faith who are due to retire in the next few years or just recently retired, but I liked his suggestion at the end of the video for those who are still young and have a better chance to protect themselves from poverty in old age.

I don't think they really understand how much people didn't necessarily know or have an idea how to even find out back in the pre or early internet days.

The government 'label' it as a benefit so it is!

how about those taking the hit are those claiming benefits because they wouldn't be better off working and contributing and as such choose to stay at home? How about people take more responsibility for their life choices rather than just constantly asking for more handouts? It is deeply immoral to say older people should not get their pension at a decent age because money are diverted to all sorts of other benefits. There has been a social contract in place, you pay taxes and you get health care a pension at an age, police enforcing law and order etc. Nobody voted for paying taxes for money to be diverted on all sorts and to get absolutely nothing that has been pretty much guaranteed in exchange of said taxes.
Not only it's a disgrace the way things have spiralled down in the last decades but the way people seem to think about it. I truly hope some of the opinions expressed in here are not representative of the wider population. Because if they are we are trully screwed young and old, the mentality of bend over even further regardless.

What?!? The government are now claiming a person's private pension is a benefit?
People will STOP paying into any pensions invest instead.

But the OP is talking about the pension payments she has made through work, and her employer’s contributions. Thats an entirely separate private workplace pension scheme.

I’m not entirely sure she knows what national insurance contributions are.

That some goes unclaimed is not evidence of affordability.

Informing school leavers of the pension change gives them 50 plus years to prepare.

Waspi women were not informed until late 50s age range thus giving them insufficient time to prepare.

@FlubandSlub
Do you think that your workplace pension is the same thing as a state pension?

But that’s irrelevant to the main point, which is that we understood (correctly) that we were paying in then so that our pensions would be paid in the future.

Yes, the actual money we paid went to the people drawing their pensions while we were working. But in return the next generation would pay our pensions and so on. It’s not a state handout, it’s the state honouring the contract under which we paid in.

Calling it a benefit is an insult.

£22 billion goes unclaimed every year. The benefits budget is just fine.

Agree with what. The OP is fundamentally wrong about everything she posted.

The government views the state pension as a benefit. If, as a carer (which many pensioners find themselves becoming), you claim carer’s allowance, it’s seen as an overlapping benefit and it’s deducted from your pension. So old people caring for an infirm or vulnerable spouse effectively do it for nothing. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

That’s similar to the argument used by the WASPIES. Given short shrift on most MN threads.

The confidence of the ill informed always amazes me. OP where did you get your information from?

And they all seem to be on MN !! I’ve had some doozies of arguments surrounding this on various threads, but l’ve never yet encountered anyone saying that sick or disabled people shouldn’t qualify for state pension if they can’t work - or as I suspect is the case here, expected to survive on PIP alone when that was never the intention of the benefit. Until today. It demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the social contract and the safety net that social security represents. It’s depressing.

If the state pension is going to change they should change it for all school age children giving them plenty of time to prepare.

But the state pension is not the major part of that problem, there are far more egregious examples.

The state pension presently accounts for 58% of the benefits budget, so I’d say that’s a pretty significant part of the problem.

@FlubandSlubare you reading anyone's replies?

I know some people who think disabled people should live on fresh air. No PIP, no ESA.

Some benefits are universal and that’s how it should be. Why should wealthy people who are earning and contributing much more via be exempt from the state pension ? That would require the social contract to be rewritten, which would have ramifications for us all. I know at least two people who are very wealthy and have not claimed the state pension on reaching retirement age. It’s not paid automatically, you have to claim it and I’m sure many wealthy people don’t. Their choice.

I am totally with you OP
Couldn't agree more.
The problem is those posting on here you have no entitlement to a pension won't be close to retirement age, I think you get a very different perspective on things once you are.

Your NI contributions go towards funding the state pension (of current retirees) and the NHS (which is also topped up from other taxes as necessary). When you retire and become eligible for the statutory benefit of the state pension (it is a benefit, like that or not) then the current crop of working people will be paying NI and other taxes to fund you. That's how it has always been.

Your NI contributions DO NOT go into an account or pot of money that is set aside in a safe purely for you. You never entered into any such agreement with the government and nor have any of us. NI isn't and never was a savings scheme.

What you might be confusing things with is a private workplace pension, which employers now do have to provide for their employees. You pay a percentage of your salary into this scheme each month, your employer also adds a percentage and you also get tax relief from the government, so they pay some in too. These really are tax efficient savings and investment schemes in a way that NI simply isn't. You can draw on them from the age of 55 too, whereas for most of us state pension kicks in at age 67 at the moment.

I'm afraid you have shown some ignorance here, but hopefully you understand better now.

if Your employer has contributed to your pension than this is your employers private workplace pension. The government doesn’t out anything into this

within your workplace pension you might he being charged fees to the pension provider. However er this is all totally separate to the state pension that is paid for via national insurance contributions.

Whether it's a benefit or not is just semantics. Why does it matter?
You are unreasonable if you have ever assumed that the state pension would be anything more than a bare minimum amount that may or may not be enough to keep you alive.
I get that people are sick of paying into something when they end up getting very little back, but that's more true of other benefits than the state pension. We clearly cannot afford that any more and people are unwilling to keep paying. But the state pension is not the major part of that problem, there are far more egregious examples.

PIP does continue after state pension age provided the claim does not end before you reach that age. And a PIP claim will only continue for as long as you continue to satisfy the eligibility criteria, which gets more difficult with age, because PIP is a working age benefit and only considers the effects of disability and not age related conditions.

PIP does not attract automatic NI contributions. And PIP is not an income replacement benefit - it’s meant as a contribution towards the extra cost of living with a disability - surely you’re not suggesting that disabled people would be expected to live on just PIP ?