To ask what should be being done about the economy and the country generally

[AlertCat]

I’m fairly Keynesian in my economics (I’m not an economist) but there are so many problems in society at the moment that I’m not sure even a massive programme of work like in the 1950s would really help.
There’s another thread where people are expressing unhappiness at the levels of tax they’re being asked to pay and it’s easy to find lots of threads about benefit claimants and immigration.

If we take as given that (a) our birthrate means we need immigration; (b) we have a benefits system that’s both overly punitive and (apparently) overly lenient if you say the right things (I’m not sure I personally believe the second part, but it’s an opinion I see a lot); (c) climate change means more and more people from the global south moving north; (d) the days of good state services, free at the point of use may be over-

what would you do differently to the government? Could we get back to the kind of services provision we had in the post-war consensus era (up until the Thatcher government)? Is that a pipe dream? Is it even desirable?

We are nearly 70. DH is still working, running the company he created 35 years, and two heart attacks, ago. We have great staff, but none of them is the entrepreneur that DH has turned into. The business is solid, profitable but moving it into the future and its unknown hazards, nobody within the business wants to take on the inevitable risks.

I am not criticising, at all, but part of me thinks that there is a massive courage deficit in the rising generations.

Voluntary euthanasia would massively reduce care needs ...

So, um @EggnogNoggin ... what date have you chosen for your demise, since you must be volunteering, right ? Any tips on how you chose your date to help others make that decision?

I agree that wages went further years ago in terms of buying a house but millions didn’t do this. They rented council houses. When I was growing up quite a few families didn’t have a car, a holiday and no colour tv! No central heating and we walked to school. Veg were home grown and we didn’t have a supermarket. It was simpler but a hell of a lot harder in many ways.

Now that living standards have risen, or maybe a more neutral way of saying it is that now that things like central heating are generally seen as a basic feature of life rather than a luxury- how reasonable is it to ask people not to use it?

Holidays- lots of people don’t have holidays away. Fewer every year at the moment!

Walking to school is fine if your school is within a couple of miles of your home along safe routes. Rural children often don’t have this, and buses aren’t always affordable (or even provided, if the school you’re allocated isn’t your geographically closest one). Rural bus services in my county are woeful anyway and a car is a necessity- it was when I was a kid and it still is. Even buses from some of the suburbs into the city centre don’t run more than half-hourly, at morning rush hour.

Veg- allotments have never been so popular.

As for renting a council house, chance would be a fine thing. Private rents in my area are between £900 and £1200 for a 2-bed house, council houses are like hens’ teeth.

To your point about people choosing to work part time- sometimes people need to do this for their mental health. Sometimes childcare is not available to match full time hours. Sometimes the job is so demanding that full time is more like double time. (I’ve experienced all of these.)

I’m sure you know all this, of course. It’s comparing apples with oranges. I’m interested in your suggestions for how we change the things which are a problem. (Partly because I feel quite despondent about so many issues facing us all at present. Things feel bleak.)

I’m surprised it hasn’t been taken by private insurers. After all, we know that only a third of people actually need to pay for care and it’s usually less than a year or so (unfortunately).

alternatively perhaps there should be some type of pension specific scheme available where you can start saving for care and have the govt contribute in the same way as a pension - that would probably free up a lot of cash as well because the government wouldn’t be paying full whack

See my earlier posts on the thread answering your original question. If you restructure the economy appropriately then living standards will rise and people will have money to save. And then state provision can be made for those who are too disabled to ever work, as is entirely appropriate and will then be affordable.

If you are a service country making coffee for each other, based on appalling lending patterns and low interest rates then you are doomed.

Wealth is too concentrated.

@IwasDueANameChange I don’t actually believe it is. I’m the last 100 years, millions of people have had access to a decent education and a chance to go to university as well as being able to access middle class work. There’s been a big shift in the size of the middle class so definitely fewer on the breadline.

Of course we have poor people but continually having a go at the better off makes them feel unwanted and not appreciated for their huge tax contribution. They often also employ people. I think people need to grab opportunities. Jealousy is not getting anyone anywhere.

I choose when I'm showing the first signs of serious mental or significant mental decline, same way as a DNR. No years of my children watching me forget them.

I aswered your question, so you answer mine... how much in care fees do you want to pay for me if I intentionally deprive myself of any assets first? You nd Gov want me to live so you can pay for it. Money that could be used to put your grandchildren through school or give them expensive, lifesaving medical treatment?

In no way whatsoever am i saying elderly people are a burden. I'm saying i want to make a choice about my life. Why does that bother you? So much so that you'd rather take away my choice to a humane death at the cost of your own children's future, just so that you can have your choice over my life?

@EggnogNoggin I’m with you on this. It’s about time we were in control regarding our own death. Who wants a slow demise into nothingness?

This is the entire point. It was well known that this was an extremely large cohort. It was well known that life expectancies were increasing so there would be far higher pensions costs and medical costs and social care costs.

What did they do about it? Nothing. As you state, many of them thought it was fine not to work at all and just expected the next generation to support them through 20-40 year retirements and medical and social care! Even for people without occupational pensions there were of course private pensions they could have opened or savings accounts to make provision for themselves.

Simply not bothering to do so, not reforming the public sector pension and state pension ponzi schemes which would obviously become unpayable with an ageing population, not reforming the NHS to make it sustainable, and instead because of all these demands for funding for extended retirements for themselves which they had no intention to fund or work longer to provide for they voted to cut infrastructure spending, education spending etc and trash things further for the generations behind them. They voted en masse to leave the EU wrecking the economy further. They sold off many of our assets and resources and took the sale money as tax cuts or bought up shares in them as cheap investments. They voted for policies that would make housing 8 times more expensive in real terms. Yet feel totally entitled to their retirements at 60 or below in many cases and demand everyone funds retirements for them that are often longer than the number of years they worked (and as you say, many not having bothered to work at all, or save even if they did, with no plan whatsoever in place to support themselves). Then, having asset stripped the country, blown all that money on themselves and run up a huge national debt, they moan about retiring earlier than many can now dream of doing (like the WASPI women), call young people lazy (!!!), demand they get above inflation rises in pensions that they didn’t pay sufficient money to fund, and whinge about the trashed society that they have created through their unbelievable selfishness and short-sightedness. While often sitting in houses they wouldn’t have a hope in hell of buying if they were young people with the same skills and qualifications and careers today.

The hypocrisy and denial of it all is sickening. Nobody’s saying that every single member of that generation is the same and didn’t pay their way and is one of these entitled and deluded people who believes they deserve decades of retirement funded by others and healthcare and social care they have never paid a sufficient amount to fund (I say again, £200k deficit in lifetime tax payments per Boomer on average compared to the services and benefits they receive over a lifetime) - the like of which they never provided for their own parents who had actually fought in a war - but enough of them are that as a cohort they have absolutely wrecked this country’s economy and are still sucking up the vast majority of public spending. If the country is to have a future that needs to stop and public spending needs redirecting to support young people and families, education, infraatructure and technology, so that living standards can finally begin to rise again.

You think demonstrable real-terms economic decline in terms of salaries for specific careers and enormous real-terms rises in basic costs of living such as essentials like housing are negates by technological advances of more people having a TV and central heating? I bet you object to people eating avocados as well because you couldn’t grow them in your garden as a child.

This is exactly the kind of absurd economic illiteracy that is the problem.

This is the classic ridiculousness of the older generation now who despite being the most privileged generation in the whole of history continuously attempt to make out that they were hard done by because technology has advanced since they were children. 🤦🏻‍♀️🙄 It’s so tiresome. And yet this is the generation also marching around constantly calling other people snowflakes but seemingly oblivious to the irony.

Newsflash: decent people want their children and grandchildren to have a better and more prosperous life than they did. They don’t want to impoverish them, lumber them with their debts and pull up the drawbridge behind themselves and then tell their descendants that they should count themselves lucky to be keeping you all in the life of leisure and lifestyle that you’ve become accustomed to.

Bloody hell @InPraiseOfIdleness is there anything that you don't want to lay at the feet of older people? Your bitterness is somewhat disproportionate considering the fact that the generation you are complaining about are also one of the few remaining sources of younger generations getting on the housing ladder via inheritance. Is that wrong too?

You've paid a lip service to "not all pensioners" but it's clear you feel the vast majority are personally responsible for everything wrong with our current economy, regardless of the times they lived in and that they were sold political ideology by people in power.

By your reasoning, when we are old, we should be absolutely pilloried for allowing technology to proliferate with all its environmental, employment and social negatives, and when we whine "but we had no choice" - which materially we don't - will you self-flagellate in the way you seem to want our elders to do?

Every generation works with the system that exists at the time, and the law of unintended consequences catches out the most prudent.

And for heavens sake, pop a couple of Kalms and swig some Gaviscon. I'm worried about your blood pressure and the potential for ulcers.

Scrap Challenge 25. Get teens and young people drinking again. This would lead to more business for pubs, clubs and taxi drivers, kebab shops and pizzerias, chicken shops and curry houses as well as for the high street as the teens/twenty-somethings flock to buy makeup and clothes for going out-out. It would also boost online sales as people make drunken impulse buys on their phones while half cut. And with all those drunken young people, this would probably reverse the declining birthrate too!

Oh dear. You had to lower the tone into personal insults, didn’t you? So unnecessary and exemplifies precisely the defensive attitude to which I was referring, taking generational economic analysis as some kind of personal slight and lashing out to the person describing what the multiple economic studies on this topic show unequivocally.

It’s also clear from your response that you’ve thoroughly misunderstood my comments about technology as well as economics. Technology is a good thing and something we should be investing in. My issue, as stated, is with the ridiculous comments that are made that somehow having TVs or smartphones compensates for degrading living standards and real-terms earnings and the entitlement of that cohort still trying to justify their consumption of the vast majority of public spending to the detriment of everyone else in society. The Four Yorkshiremen style comments about not having central heating etc are tiresome and irrelevant (and by the way, I was living in an apartment with no heating still in the 2000s so it’s totally irrelevant, anyway).

Time to get some sleep, perhaps.

They might do but it’s statistically unlikely to live to 95 given average life expectancy. People do pay for those pensions, the employee and employer contributions together are about 1/3 of salary so they’re paying far more than 8k a year. If they’re on 60k they’ll be paying about 7k in every year just in employee contributions.its not actually that great a return Most people don’t pay 12% in so no they won’t get a good pension!

Ok, I won't bother responding to you any further, although I don't quite see how expressing shock at the rather brutal and condescending tone of your posts counts as personal insult.

Currently I'm rather more concerned about the sudden escalation in military action on the India / Pakistan border and how that might impact things globally, especially as China is "right behind" Pakistan apparently.

We may have bigger problems than triple locked pensions if this gets out of hand.

While I'm not in the UK we have many of the same issues here. I agree with this post - all the CEOs at my last full-time workplace started their working life at the bottom after leaving school and worked their way to the top, and yet there were people with (agricultural) degrees working on the shop floor (of an agricultural business). Madness!!

And here we go ,the generation who always think it is someone else's fault. Of course if you had been a part of these generations you obviously despise you would haven't have done what they did would you?!!! Of course in your warped mind everyone in these horrendous generations behaved in exactly the same way, it seems they were all a bunch of mindless sheep. You don't have the faintest idea about the lives of these people, or why they did what they did, or even what they did.

You do realise that when you are old the generations coming behind may well be blaming your generation for all the ills in their life?

The past, as they say, is another country. Stop blaming others for everything that's wrong and make some effort to improve things.

Oh how naive you are. Does anyone exist outside your little bubble?

@InPraiseOfIdleness The old, as individuals, didn't cause these problems.

After a childhood of the kind of poverty you can't even imagine, in the 60s & 70s, we were encouraged to make the best careers we could, to work hard & be self reliant etc.

So I worked my socks off and won a place at grammar school and then at poly. Then a career. I've paid 35 years higher rate tax and trained seven apprentices so far. Still working full time at 61. No part time work when had small DC. I've been a net contributor since I was 24. 44 years NI paid so far.

I've renovated four homes on my own so far, that had been left in such a state by the previous occupants, no-one else wanted them. (The only ones I could afford on my own). Homes now returned to warm, safe, use.

I've claimed no benefits. Had one birth, one maternity leave. One short treatment for cancer. I have a GP appt about once a decade. A 2 minute dentist checkup twice a year.

There are millions like me. We didn't cause society's problems. We are the teachers and dentists and doctors and parents who have raised you, supported you, fed you, educated you.

You blaming us for today's problems is like me blaming my mum for the poverty we experienced following world war two. Don't be such a fool.

Without massive housing reform to stop profiteering and ‘nest egging’ by private owners, and a reversal of the huge tax burden that’s piped into the open maw of the public sector, we’re stuffed.

@Papyrophile agree - the whole economy needs to be looked at to support people going into diverse paths and taking risks to do things other than work for the public sector or a huge multi national.

we’ve not understood for years that in all sectors diversity is needed. In education, jobs, housing, health…

Have to agree with either word of that. Very well put!

And get back to supporting small businesses etc. We’ve spent 2 or 3 decades turning our backs on small independent shops, pubs, etc., embraced Amazon, sought out cheap crap from China. Buy new from china instead of getting stuff repaired. That’s why our villages are dead, towns are dying. We’ve sleepwalked into thinking small businesses are bad, now we’re reaping what we sowed. Look at Rishi excluding 3 million self employed from covid support schemes - says it all! We need to be encouraging self employment and small businesses, not be jealous of them, it’s how well grow the economy via innovation, local employment, etc.