… to think that no one wants to speak up for the younger generation?

[SnowBells]

I don't know what it is. Maybe political correctness gone mad.

Pensioners who are already wealthy get winter fuel allowance, etc. Each time this kind of stuff gets mentioned on things like Question Time or something, people shout and whistle, showing complete disregard for the subject, and no real debate can happen.

I am not talking about the pensioners who aren't well off. But a huge proportion of pensioners did profit from the higher house prices - something not likely to happen for the younger generation.

Our kids have to pay to go to uni. My generation will retire much, much later. We also have to pay for inflated house prices.

And yet, there will be people who say 'but we've paid our taxes'. Well, we pay taxes and our kids will, too, but we are likely to get A LOT less back. I just feel there's a huge generational wealth divide. And I wonder why no one wants to discuss this properly? Why do people want to stop a debate before it has even had a chance to happen?

Everyone will die. Your legacy is the next generation. So why not speak up for what essentially will be your only legacy?

But 30k 25 years ago wasn't worth the same as 90k now. It just wasn't.

And that link shows that the average house price was 4.5 times the average wage in 1989.
Which should make the average house price now £117k.

Instead of the 250k that it actually is...

the solution is for smaller houses to be built and more flats. with an increasing population, we need to use the land we have better.

The solution is far from knocking up a bunch of rabbit hutches. We build the smallest homes in the EU due to not adopting minimum sizing.

that's because we have the highest population density.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_European_countries

we could build upwards?

I think 30k in 1990 is prob around 55k now... Just thinking about my dad as thats what he was earning around then as a 40 year old quantity surveyor. My DH as a 40 year old teacher (Head of Department) is on around 41k although a comparable profession.

No, it's because the government allows developers to do this. We tried building upwards and are now knocking down towers left and right.

Princess Anne believes villages should take the brunt of new housing as they already have infrastructure....
My village has just had 1200 new houses built. The 2 local Schools are at capacity and the local gp surgery can't cope either.

We don't need smaller houses, what we need to do is use the unoccupied buildings we have, and also build decent homes with decent gardens that people actually want to live in. There is not a shortage of land, there is not even a shortage of brownfield sites, its just that they are not as profitable for large scale developers to build upon/renovate.

and I DO blame the Boomers for the mess we are in, they are the generation that systematically brought in short term policies that benefited their generation and their generation alone and now demonise those of us who were unfortunate enough to be born after 1979. They sold off our national inheritence, and pocketed the proceeds.

Also there is not a shortage of land. This is a myth peddled by land owners and large scale developers to keep prices high.

Any new houses will just fill up and 20 years down the line we will just have the same problem all over again. We need to control the population, and eventually, reduce it. These islands are already vastly overpopulated, if there was any kind of global disaster and we had to be self-sufficient we would be up shit creek without a paddle.

OMG - you can't make houses any smaller. Houses in the UK are already *HOBBIT HOMES"...

Birth rates are declining in developed countries, across europe it is at less than replacement rate.

and I DO blame the Boomers for the mess we are in, they are the generation that systematically brought in short term policies that benefited their generation and their generation alone and now demonise those of us who were unfortunate enough to be born after 1979. They sold off our national inheritence, and pocketed the proceeds.

We are also the generation who fought for (and still fight for) equality for women, LGBTs and other minority groups. We marched and campaigned for better health care, fairer benefits and compensation for those damaged by industrial injury or drugs that should never have been on the market.

Do not demonise an entire generation for the actions of some. Not all of us voted Tory.

Some of us looked at how the world was in the 60s and didn't like what we saw. We didn't whine and blame the previous generations we got off our backsides and organised campaigns to try to make society better.

Happy to hand the baton over to succeeding generations, if they can be arsed.

It is not anyone's fault. Nobody set out to make the young poor. It is a result of the unpredicted change in life expectancy coupled with pyramid-like Ponsi pension schemes (whereby the greater number of people joining pay for high benefits of original members, which is only sustainable if the number of people enrolled continues to swell) especially where they lingered in the public sector long after it was realised that they were unaffordable and unjust.

BUT where you can lay blame is on those not daring to right this wrong - politicians of all parties who are scared of alienating the older voter.

The sense of entitlement of some of the retired (we paid in, now we are taking out) is also annoying as it shows no grasp of economics. As a generation they are taking out much more than they ever put in Yes, sure, you can point to individuals who paid a lot of tax and NIC all their lives and never took a penny but there are two fallacies there. First, they are ignoring generous child benefit, mortgage subsidies, comparatively high personal tax allowances, and being inflated out of debt. Secondly, tax and NIC is not a savings scheme. It is spent in the year it is collected. An individual's taxes and NIC have to pay the less fortunate person's unemployment benefit, or disability benefit, older workers' pensions etc and is not simply put in a pot ready for them to take back once they have retired. It is a mutual scheme. If everyone who paid in wanted back everything they had ever paid then how would we pay for hospitals, the unemployed, the police etc. Tax and NI doesn't work like that. If you want that, you have to pay into a defined benefits pension scheme.

ProfPlum - what you say is correct. But its even worse than that.

The fact is that to fund a retirement at 50% of final after tax salary for 20 years you have to work for 40 years and pay in 25% of your after tax salary. Nobody did that in the Boomer Generation. They were buying houses with it mainly.

What people were paying in terms of NI was actually barely covering the cost of Family Allowance, the cost of NHS care for themselves and their family and unemployment insurance. Absolutely no one was paying money to cover their state pension - ever.

I am technically a 'boomer' - born in the very last year of the Boomer Generation. My parents are technically not boomers as they were born in the year before the Boomer Generation.

Its a question of attitude that defines the 'Boomer Generation' not age though.

In my lifetime I have seen the door slam shut behind me as each year has gone by. I was able to benefit from the last few years of subsidised private school (assisted places scheme), the last few years of free university (full grant scheme), and the NHS has been generally good for me with relatively short waiting times, and I will probably get a basic state pension.

People just 5 - 10 years younger will get none of that.

I really do feel very strongly that the 'Boomer Generation' deliberately robbed the younger generation. They knew what they were doing. They spent the wealth their parents created, they spent what wealth they created and they have now spent the wealth that has and will be created by their children and their grandchildren. They did this by running up enormous debts both in public and private sector and spent it all. We and our children will spend our lives paying that back.

They really are not the 'luckiest' generation. They are the greediest generation. Frankly I can see a day where the younger generation refuse to pay and effectively vote for euthanasia by demanding that certain types of health care be withheld from people over the age of 70.

That will be the revenge of the young.

Nobody deliberately did anything. We have the power to vote for an MP every few years. I have always voted and always got some stupid public school rich arse who turns up in London when it suits.

We should be like Australia and everyone should be forced to vote. That won't solve problems but at least everyone would have a say whether they think it makes any difference or not.

They deliberately ran up public spending deficits and pension deficits and did nothing to stop it happening. They knew it was happening. They didn't rein in spending. They didn't reduce entitlements to pensions. They kept promising more and more to get elected.

Labour Governments did this just as much as Tory.

They deliberately created house price inflation - see the interview given by Eddie George (former Bank of England Governor) a few years before he died. He confirmed they knew what their aim was and how they were going to do it. It led to the financial crisis.

It is in the public record.

I didn't do any of that MoreBeta, but you want to kill me anyway. Nice.

They = Members of Parliament?

Not everyone who happened to be born 1946 to mid 1960s.

The fact is that it is unsustainable, even now. 'Retirement', as in drawing state pension, was supposed to last about 5 years with a certain percentage caring it before ever drawing it. Not more and more people living 30+ years on it, often with more and more expensive to treat health problems.

I think MoreBeta has highlighted the potentially worrying outcome of all this - that when the money runs out, people will try to protect what's "theirs".

So you'll get horrible arguments of who deserves what based on what they've paid in - it's already happening with unemployment (scroungers, feckless, workshy), it's starting with people on disability benefits (ATOS's lovely sign of "Fit to Protest = Fit to Work") how much further will it go?

We may not get to a Logan's Run situation, but you can imagine a certain apathy arising towards euthanasia laws, a "rationing" of treatment for the over 70s/80s/90s on the basis it can't be justified, the insistence that some care only comes with a private cost.

We need, as a society, to be able to agree what's best for the country as whole. We need to consider whether we want to be a country that looks after people or not, and then make long term decisions that allows us to do this, rather than each section of society protecting their own interests at the cost of another's.

I am an optimist. I think people will adapt and cope with smaller houses. many people the world over do. this is just a transition phase.

I don't think older people do themselves any favors by refusing to discuss the retirement age. As was said upthread a bit, retirement was never intended to last for 30 years - the math is all wrong.

not when they see others rattling around on their own in large homes saying, well, you need to adapt. I'm all right, Jack. I don't think smaller homes are the answer, either, when so little of the island is built out and so many dwellings are unoccupied.

I should say, pension-funded retirement, not retirement.