“We paid in all our lives”: AIBU to think, No you didn’t?

[Perlman]

My grandparents are traditional red wall labour voters. Born during WWII to poor families, they live where they grew up. My grandad worked in a factory and my nan worked as a secretary. Like many of their generation, they lived in and bought their council house. Very caring people until it comes to politics. They are hugely racist and advocate for sinking any refugee boats. This is despite the fact that some of their grandparents were refugees from Russia!

They want the triple lock, free bus passes, heating allowance, increased benefits for older people, et cetera. They think anyone who isn’t old who takes benefits is a scrounger and lazy. They say young people can’t afford to buy a house because they are lazy. They have inherited several, but put down their relatively comfortable position in retirement as to their ‘hard work’.

They justify their opinions and entitlement by saying “we paid in all ours lives, it’s our money”. AIBU to think that, well no, not really. You may have paid in money through taxation but clearly they are net beneficiaries of the state. They both had low paid jobs, bought and sold on their council house for a tidy profit, have thankfully lived a long life but with a myriad of expensive to treat health problems. So no, they haven’t paid for what they’re taking!

@Jamtartforme honestly you are wasting your time!

I have time to waste fortunately - stuck under a napping baby!

There you go. Fill your boots. Added to which, 35 years of NI contributions are needed to qualify for a full pension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_in_the_United_Kingdom

The logical progression is a move to discriminate against those who can't contribute as much or who have had to 'spend' their pot early for whatever reason.

Put simply - If you have a life long chronic condition then that is going to cost the NHS more than someone who does not. It is also likely that you wouldn't be able to contribute in the same way and that the long term outcomes for your family are worse (poverty is a key driver of long term inequality) and that they too will be spending their 'pot' sooner.

The whole point of taxation is to support society and the individual members within. How this money is distributed is a political decision driven by ideology. To my mind this ideology would, in the long term, lead to a worse, less caring society with the healthy well off benefiting at the expense of the poorest and least able to help themselves.

A bit off point I know.

There are two issues here. Your gp’s are racist and sound like thoroughly awful people. But….they have paid in all their lives if they were working.
I am 65, I don’t get my state pension until I’m 67, most of my generation didn’t go off to university, we started work full time at 16 ( and most previously worked part time school holidays and weekends ) apart from 3 years as a sahm I paid tax and insurance and never claimed anything other than child benefit. I was never in a position to obtain a private pension. Our living standards back then were much much lower than you have today, but we didn’t know any better, we were grateful for what we had and tried to save up for anything we needed. Women couldn’t get a credit card, we bought mostly second hand furniture and didn’t have a phone line or a car for the first 10-15 years of marriage. Mortgages were calculated on the man’s salary only. We ate out at a local pub or restaurant once, maybe twice a year for birthdays, that was a massive treat. Holidays ? Nope, maybe a trip to visit relatives in another part of the country.

Compare that with my own offspring, well paid equal jobs, 2 very expensive cars on the drive, homeowners with brand new furniture replaced regularly, two holidays abroad a year. Sky, Netflix, phone contracts, kids in expensive clubs. That’s just their normal, the way our lives were just our normal, neither generation more happy than the other. They certainly don’t begrudge our pensions when we get it, I don’t begrudge their lifestyle that they work hard to pay for, just as we did before them.

Or, in many cases in working class families, the mothers went back to work and the grandmothers cared for the children while they did so. These days, grandmothers of the age they then were are still working at their own jobs.

Equality for women has led to capitalism squeezing out more family money for themselves, such that it is now very difficult for a family to manage without both partners working, just to pay the bills.

My mother was born in 1936, my grandmother in 1912. They both worked all their lives and paid tax. DH's mother was born in 1936 and his grandmother in 1909. His grandmother evacuated her children in the war and worked in a factory for the war effort, his mother had 10 years out of work when her children were small but then worked from 1971 until 1996 as a teacher and then a deputy head teacher.

I am 63 and still work full-time. I earn a high salary. I get free prescriptions. It is absurd.

Only 57% of women of working age actually worked in the 1970s. It hovered around this figure until the late 90s.

My generation became working age in the early 70s. You’re talking about y parent’s’ generation. And I’ve already told you that there was little to no childcare available. How were women with children under school age supposed to work full time? Stick the kids in a cupboard for the day?

@Blossomtoes you are giving me links to
unemployment figures... That doesn't tell me that everyone who is a pensioner now worked all their lives & paid tax?

Added to which, 35 years of NI contributions are needed to qualify for a full pension.

Has the 35 year thing been a rule for decades then?
Plus 35 yrs is nothing like a whole life of work, I paid from 17 & my pension age is 68 so more than 50 yrs.

Exactly. People should have to pass an exam in economics before they are allowed to vote.

The rubbish that is spouted on here like "tax the rich" or "tax big corporations more".

People don't have a clue.

Ireland has the lowest corporation tax rate in Europe and therefore has many large companies investing there. Yet, people on MN want to tax big companies more. They don't know that they will stop investing in the UK if we keep doing that.

They have lived at a good time.

Not having to serve in any world wars.
NHS created, therefore good free healthcare all their lives.
House ownership achieved on 1 average salary. Paid off on time or earlier.
Huge house price inflation meaning paid off assets have achieved huge profits.

House ownership and reaping huge benefits from it will probably not happen to any other generation

They need to bring in compulsory voting in the UK. Until they do, we'll continue to live in a hugely unfair society, where the older generation get all the benefits at the expense of the younger. Because the older generation vote selfishly to benefit themselves and the youngsters don't bother to vote at all.
But we won't get compulsory voting because the older generation won't vote for it (because it would not be to their benefit to have young people voting) so we'll just carry on as we are

No. Until relatively recently it used to be 44 years. (going from memory). I know, because I used to check my pension forecast on-line. Then it went down to 35 years, and with the years I worked, plus my years with Home Responsibility Protection, I qualified for full State Pension, plus a little extra due to SERPS. It isn't much though.

It is forgotten that until fairly recently, the person who claimed the Child Benefit and stayed at home, would have NI credits for the years they did so. And they could do so up to the point of the school leaving age - so for a considerable number of years, dependant on how many children they had. If a lone parent was on Income Support, there was no requirement to seek work if their youngest child was younger than the school leaving age.

Then there was the Married Woman's Reduced NI payment. My mother fell foul of that...(for context she is now 93) This was introduced because the system expected that women would not be bread-winners, and would depend on their husbands for State Pension in the future.

But those figures don’t take into account people who are economically inactive, ie the women who didn’t work because they had small children or simply didn’t because the husbands salary sustained them both.

If you’re economically inactive you’re not paying NI, yet still expecting to receive a state pension. That’s what this thread is about. You’re also not paying tax and contributing to services you use.

And being economically inactive isn’t a form of unemployment which means on paper you ‘still worked all your life’. Either you’re working or you’re not, and half of women didn’t.

True pip and not to mention free higher education.

My mum visited a few days ago and it was like having GB News on full whack

She didn't used to be like this; since Covid she's isolated herself with only the right wing media for company. It's concerning.

It allows you to see that the vast majority of the population was in employment during the period in question. It’s a bit pointless demanding stats if you don’t have the skills to interpret them or extrapolate information when they’re provided.

You’re looking at the wrong time frame for the boomer generation. I really wonder if you genuinely don’t get it or are being disingenuous.

How can the vast majority have been in employment when half of women - so roughly 25% of working age people - were not in work? You seem to be missing the point spectacularly.

I didn’t mention boomers. I’m looking at people in their 70s now, who would’ve been of working age in the 70s and 80s.

I’m not missing the point at all. You are. Because you’re looking at an irrelevant time period.

In all honesty if they can't keep their opinions about this to themselves around me I wouldn't have anything to do with them.

Why is it irrelevant? It’s a time period when people in their 70s now would’ve been 20-40, ish. So of working age.

That’s the boomer generation. Has it really not sunk in that those were the years in which women were having children during which they took time out because there was no option? Do you genuinely not understand the implications of no childcare?

@Blossomtoes I agree but I think that what is often forgotten is the fact that as women got more equal rights and could return to work, it fuelled house price increases because couples could afford bigger mortgages on the old 2.5 or 3 x highest and 1 x lowest basis. It went really awry in the early 90s.