To worry that the conservatives are going to target pensioners next

[Sjdorset]

Have anyone else noticed the anti pensioner stuff out this week? Firstly about getting rid of the essential tripple lock (2.5% so not a huge increase) and the talk that pensioners are supposedly getting more than working age people (why shouldn't they after all they have worked their entire life and don't have options available to increase their earnings).

I'm worried they maybe next on the target list, quite frankly I think this is a worrying trend building up.

www.express.co.uk/finance/retirement/445956/Fears-for-pensions-as-government-s-crucial-triple-lock-guarantee-faces-axe

Im not convinced by the pensioner trump card of "I lived through rationing, Ive didnt have it easy!". Everyone alive in the UK then had rationing, so communities had to work together, converting any green space into vegetable lots, pooling resources.
I think the families who have had all their benefits cut and are relying heavily on food bank donations to ensure that their children can eat something might well choose the nationwide rationing system instead.

15k bought the house outright.

I can believe that.

But I can't believe that he could have earned 15k in eight weeks. That would require him to take home nearly £2,000 a week and doesn't account for any living expenses.

£2000 a week wages is an astronomical sum now and with adjustment for inflation it would have been colossal. So unless he was an eccentric tycoon who had a life long yearning to live in Doncaster, I suspect the wrong end of the stick has been grasped somewhere along the line.

But I can't believe that he could have earned 15k in eight weeks. That would require him to take home nearly £2,000 a week

As a sense of inflation, you could live well as a student in the early 1980s on two grand. Now to do the same (hall, food, clothes, books, entertainment) you'd need eight grand. So the claim is that the poster's mate was earning the equivalent of eight grand a week take home, so 400k per year, or about 750k per year pre-tax. It seems a trifle unlikely.

Boomers didn't really have rationing, neither of my parents can remember a thing about it.

My dad always grumbles that his retirement was delayed until 55, yet 20 years later he's probably taken out far more in his pension than he ever paid in.

I don't get the WFA. In this time of a housing shortage, it encourages pensioners to live in bigger than needed dwellings.

My dad is 71 and a Boomer. He had rationing as a child. He still has my grandmothers rationing book. He was about 10 when it went away. Food however was extremely expensive. My grandfather was involved in shipping and would bring home bananas. My dad was the only kid on the Wirral with bunches of bananas in the fruit bowl. To this day my dad only eats them when they are rotten because that's how he ate them as a child. He doesn't like them when they are yellow or with brown spots on them.

Want if he's 71 your dad was born during the war not after it baby-boomers were born post 1946.

Most baby-boomers will have no real memory of rationing, by the early 50s most items were off ration (Sweets were the last thing to go off ration in 54 if I recall correctly)

Firstly he's not a boomer and food was more expensive back then, especially imported exotic food. Now we have cheaper food, but way more expensive homes .

I don't get the WFA. In this time of a housing shortage, it encourages pensioners to live in bigger than needed dwellings.
So £200 p.a per household encourages pensioners to have too many bedrooms - really?
there is a shortage of affordable family homes but I don't feel you can lay it at the door of pensioners using £4 a week to heat unused bedrooms when it would cost them the best part of £10k to move

there is a shortage of affordable family homes but I don't feel you can lay it at the door of pensioners

I am not laying the housing crisis "at the door of pensioners". It's a problem bigger than them, but every bit needs to be done as it is so bad.

pensioners aren't downsizing and one reason is that we are taking away one of the main incentives to do so: cost. Pensioners are also not downsizing because the bedroom tax doesn't apply to them.

Firstly the 'bedroom tax' only applies to social housing
Secondly, pensioners who own their own homes (who incidentally do not care a stuff how much the house is worth as it is their 'home') are not affected as they don't get HB and are not in social housing.
Pensioners aren't downsizing because it costs a lot to do so (stamp duty, legal cost, moving cost) NOT because they get a £200 a year winter fuel allowance. - hardly one of the 'main' incentives as you put it.

Now if pensioners were re-imbursed for the cost of their move - that would be an incentive but £200 does not really make them so comfortable they refuse to downsize and I am surprised you would think it would.

If you read an earlier post of mine on this thread - I did advocate getting rid of all the very small pensioner 'perks' if it would stop the pensioner bashing we have seen here and in other places.
What happened to us in the past was not of our deliberate making
Ask yourself honestly - if you were given the option of a means-tested grant and fee paid University education in the 1970s when you had worked hard for 3 good A levels - would you not have taken it to be one of the elite 10% of young people to graduate?
If you were offered a good job on graduation - would you not have taken it?
If you managed to get a mortgage (after saving for years) to buy your first family home at 3 times your salary - would you not have taken it?
When interest rates soared and income tax was at 30% would you not have struggled on in the hope that things would get better?
or would you have thought - no - if I do these things it will be worse for the later generations and they will despise me for my opportunities.
hindsight is a wonderful thing and we really did not know things would be so tough for the later generations but (and this is important) we did not do it on purpose.
rant over.

I think it is pretty important to distinguish between baby boomer pensioners i.e. those born post war and pensioners born before or doing the war. We are not one amorphous group and the experiences of a baby boomer born in, say 1950, and a pensioner born in, say, 1940, will have been somewhat different.

Mollie the issue isnt that people got all those great perks and opportunities, its that theres a certain percentage of people who are living very comfortably now because of them, while at the same time smugly looking down on the younger people who are struggling with none of them because they "just arent trying hard enough".

the issue isnt that people got all those great perks and opportunities, its that theres a certain percentage of people who are living very comfortably now because of them, while at the same time smugly looking down on the younger people who are struggling with none of them because they "just arent trying hard enough". But where are these people? Most people on this thread who admit to being Baby Boomers have also said they can see the sense in reducing pensioner perks or limiting them to the poorest pensioners.
In real life I don't know anyone who looks down on younger people and says they 'just aren't trying enough'.

They say it, but pensioners keep voting in disproportionate numbers for the party that enriched them at the expense of their children and grandchildren.

larry I have seen it in here where older people say the current generation of under 40 year olds have never had it so easy. How everything would be fine if we cut back on luxury items like mobile phones and fancy Internet access.

Truth is both sides are as right as they are wrong. We live in a different era today than even 30 years ago. Think about when back to the future was released and what life was like then and what it is like now. It's totally different in terms of expectations.

As for my dad- he has always considered himself to be a boomers. I won't break it to him. I will argue that right now there aren't many boomers who are retired and collecting pensions. That is going to change in the next decade and it's going to see a monumental shift in policies.

In the late 1960s Bob Monkhouse purchased a video recorder. One of the very first ones. It was new technology at the time and cost more than a house. (a resulting copyright row which Monkhouse won is how come people were allowed to record shows) Now new technology (the latest iphone house robot .....whatever costs much much less than a house.

My dad is 71 and a Boomer

The Baby Boom is more complex in the UK than in the US (the term "boomer" is an American coinage for their straightforward post-war boom 1945-60ish): there a brief spike in the UK birth rate in 1946/7 as men come home from the war, then a steady rise through the 1950s to a peak in 1964, then it drops like a stone from 1967 onwards. The there's another wider bulge in the mid 1980s until the mid 1990s as the bulge from the mid-1960s have children. As soon as people born in the mid-1960s stop having children in quantity, the birthrate drops off a cliff: there's about a 20% drop in the number of 18 year olds year on year through the next ten years, as universities are going to find to their cost.

The real retirement bombshell is still ten to fifteen years out, when the huge bulge born 1961-1967 retire. That's going to have huge ramifications.

Maybe the Tory pensioner voters are more concerned that 8% of the tax take and 3% of GDP goes on simply servicing the debt and are conscious of what that money could do for people if it wasn't having to be thrown at reducing the debt. And if the debt is not reduced that money will continue to be unavailable for services. So they probably figure that the debt should be got down as fast as possible to free up that tax take rather than going on paying and paying and seeing nothing for it ad infinitum. Who knows?

These are probably the pensioners who agree that pensioners should take their share of the cuts.

They may even be the quarter of pensioners who, for example, never claim a bus pass even though entitled.

It's hard trying to persuade people that pensioners are not all clones who think alike.

Well the tories have attacked the disabled with great glee, now having a go at the working poor - I guess the old folk are next on the hit list. Utter bastards. I hope every single tit who voted for them hangs their heads in shame. Even Thatcher drew the line somewhere. This current lot seem to have no decency whatsoever.

We in the Labour Party will only win the next election with a substantial number of ex-Tory voters. Talk about "new politics" and "the disengaged young" is the stuff of Stalinist Trot fantasists: 95 of the 100 lowest turnout constituencies are already held by Labour, mostly with thumping majorities, so a program of energising non-voters will simply increase the majorities in already safe seas.

That being the case, calling voters - who are never, ever wrong - "utter bastards" and "tits" who should "hang their heads in shame" is possibly not the best doorstep campaigning strategy a constituency might come up with. Going around to suspected Tory voters and yelling at them that they are bastards is probably not going to be the start of a move back to voting Labour.

Pensioners aren't downsizing because it costs a lot to do so (stamp duty, legal cost, moving cost) NOT because they get a £200 a year winter fuel allowance. - hardly one of the 'main' incentives as you put it.

yes, obviously the bedroom tax doesn't apply to home owners.

I didn't say the WFA is the main incentive, I said that one of the main incentives for downsizing is the cost of maintaining a larger than needed dwelling, and some of that is heating. This is part of it.

There are many calls to eliminate stamp duty too as you are correct that that is one of the main barriers to moving. Stamp duty has completely outlived it's purpose. When it was first designed it was there to ensnare expensive homes. Now absolutely nothing in London is exempt from it.

When you say "pensioner bashing", I don't really get what you mean. Pensioners get massive exemptions from costs that others pay. That's not bashing, but just fact.

oh, I'll say WFA pales in comparison to the new rules regarding property and inheritance. They really give older people a disincentive to downsize.

calling voters - who are never, ever wrong - "utter bastards" and "tits" who should "hang their heads in shame" is possibly not the best doorstep campaigning strategy a constituency might come up with. Going around to suspected Tory voters and yelling at them that they are bastards is probably not going to be the start of a move back to voting Labour.

I have made this point all along.

Pensioners get massive exemptions from costs that others pay.

And in a spectacularly patronising way, too.

I have a theory that people's conception of "pensioner" is set when they are about 12, so they think of all pensioners being their grandmothers (ie, David Cameron's conception of a "pensioner" is someone born around the time of the first world war, when his grandparents were born).

Hence WFA in a sane world would be paid monthly, because all the cheap tariffs for fuel are direct debit monthly budget accounts with averaged payments. Instead it's still living in a world where people pay bills in cash down the post office. Ditto the free TV license, ditto the bus pass: the idea is that pensioners keep their money in envelopes on the mantlepiece.