Who is going to pay for your state pension/ care in old age?

[itsadlibitum]

Apparently birth rates are falling, and this is putting future pensions (and I would imagine general tax income) in jeopardy as the population will proportionally age.

What's the solution? Should we just write off our paid for "right" to a state pension and state support for care in older age?

Does this change your view on public investment in supporting people to have children if you otherwise thought this was a personal choice and you should support/ pay for your own children?

AIBU to think that NI contributions for "pension" is essentially government mandated mis-selling and state pension will go out the window in the next few decades?

Thanks @Picklesandfrickles

Most of those co-morbidities can be managed with medication. As for the physical limitations - those with desk jobs will have to plod on and the threshold for accessing sickness benefits will rise. It's not ideal but the state pension was never intended to fund 20+ years of not working as it has for my relatives.

My son...

That is the honest answer to this scenario. Obviously private pensions will tide us over for now, but even they rely on a young and strong work-force to keep their investments growing. If we taken the worse-case scenario of population collapse that the OP is talking about, then then answer is your children.

Who cared for elderly people before pensions became a strong viable option? It was their children - the only people who would do it without being paid.

The reality of the population collapse is that once pensions become unviable (or reduced to such an amount that they keep you alive but don't give you a decent quality of life, retirement care will split into two halves:

The rich will have enough capital to retire as now,
The middle + Poor will go back to relying on their children.

Actually I live in a country where pensions aren't as developed and most pensioners are very poor. In the vast majority of families, they just move in with their kids. Sell your house, gives the money to your kids, and put yourself in their hands, supporting the family with whatever amounts of pension you do receive.

Honestly, in the course of human history, being independent in your old age is an absolute outlier that even today only exists in a minority of countries. Is it a thing that you are forced to burden your children? Of course not, but if pensions become impossible, it is the only choice.

It does however present an interesting rebalancing of the social contract though.

It makes having children, and multiple, far more desirable because they become your future security (as they used to be...)

And it makes pushing your more of your resources into helping your child grow/develop even more essential and desirable, because again, they are your financial security.

It also means that the consequences for failing your child are much more severe.

And those who can’t or won’t have children? The whole thing needs to be overhauled.

i know it isn’t every case but enough, given that many people work PT or not at all once they have children because of nursery fees etc so, as well as education and healthcare, there is the cost of the top up UC. So who pays for that?

Do you raise the tax burden on non-parents to fund universal ‘free’ childcare etc to help parents work but making it impossible for non parents to save for their retirement)?

For those that can't or wont? The outcomes would be similar to the rest of the world/most of our history. Without pensions, unless you are rich, old age without a family is rough.

I'm not saying I want this, or that it is good. I hope our pension system will last forever - but I'm just playing out the OP's population crisis scenario...

Yes though to your question, many nations around the world already effectively tax non-parents more than parents (however it usually done by decreasing the tax on parents, rather than increasing the tax on the child-free). In fact where I live (not U.K.) there are already direct tax refunds available for people who have children, meaning I pay less tax than an equivalent person, doing the same job, and having the same lifestyle but without kids.

In the OP's scenario, I think this would be even more common and extreme.

The rational for it would be simple - having children is doing a service to a society that relies on a young workforce. Parents are giving countless hours of free labor to build something that we all (including non-parents) need, and in fact the choice to not be parents only exists because of others providing the next generation for you. So it can quite easily be rationalized that as a reward for that societal contribution, they pay less tax comparatively.

So childless/childfree people would have to pay more to support others, therefore not be able to get a pension pot or whatever and then when they retire, they get nothing.

It is an interesting scenario. You talk about ‘free labour’ etc but nobody has children for the sake of society. They have children because some people feel the biological imperative to do so, or they like children or whatever.

But given that in this scenario non parents have already paid a huge proportion of their earnings to support families, only to be left to die in poverty because they can’t afford to live as a result without a pension, where’s the incentive to work?

Going by what you say about your country, it seems that working continually from a young age, paying for the education and healthcare of others to get no benefit at all is actually rather dystopian. What happens to those childfree people when they have supported parents and their children if they can’t afford to live in old age?

You shouldn’t have children expecting them to take care of you . There are a host of reasons why they may not do so .

Because it could be argued that it’s only possible for people to have children because others are working to pay tax so that the mother and child can have decent healthcare, education, the parents can claim money because they can’t work full time etc?

Let us not pretend that the childfree are selfish.

Most people would be happy to have children if they could afford it. I would love to get out of the corporate space and raise my baby off one salary like my parents and grandparents did. However we don't get that option because that was taken from us. I remember a wonderful boomer saying "can't feed 'em don't breed 'em" guess what we listened.

‘Most’ people?

Whilst cost may be an issue for some, it is also that we don’t have to do it because of medical and societal advances. It’s seen as acceptable to not want children.

Some people want children but never find the right person, some decided when they were themselves children that they didn’t want them,

For governments to treat us as selfish and punish us financially (to our detriment) for making that choice is chilling.

Not to mention that some people can't have children, however much they might want to...

I'm not sure I agree with this. The data on who has children tends to show the exact opposite. The poorer, less socio-economically developed etc. you go, the more children people have.

There is a bit of an anomaly with the very rich wanting a lot of children. But for the most part, on average: less money = more children

Which actually ties into the awful scenario that the OP is describing. If you don't have a financial future, having a lot of children in the hope that more will prosper and maybe one will take care of you - is not exactly an awful survival strategy.

(I'd also add that all of this, and my other posts are hypothetically considering what would happen if there was no young working age population to support pensioners. I do not want this to happen, and I'm not advocating for any of this. Just thinking about what we would do, if one day pensions didn't exist, as the OP is asking about).

I agree re the socio economic profile. Anecdotally the people with the most children (4+) are the ones who wouldn’t be able to afford them if the state wasn’t picking up the tab. That is their right of course but it sucks that they are seen as selfless whereas others who aren’t putting such a drain on resources are bad people who need to be financially punished

And in all these hypothetical futures there is an argument for giving people the option not to have to slowly waste away in old age. As dystopian as it may sound, let people choose where their life ends. Because I wouldn’t want to hang around and get infirm with no money.

Is this essentially just another thread to beat people who don't have children (some who will have wanted to but haven't been able to)?

You weren't really, the pension age has gone up proportionally, so we will be spending the same proportion of our lives in retirement as previous generations, which seems fair - we have to work longer because we live longer.

The main reason that 60 was set as the retirement age for women so they could retire at the same time as their husbands, as women usually married men about 5 years older than them. I think it's right that the age has been aligned between the sexes.

Yup. That’s what it is. Obviously they will come back with a load of disclaimers about people who are unable to but those of us who have made a choice (which is what women over the decades have fought for) are apparently selfish fuckers who should give up everything to those with children.

Depressing, isn’t it!

It won’t really work relying on your children to care for you though will it, if all the ‘children’ are still working at 70+.

The difference in the older generations was people either retired between 55/60 or the women worked very PT or had been a housewife so had the time, energy and capacity to care for their parents.

Why is this particular subject brought up weekly on a loop? It seems odd.

I don't have children but I do think I should pay into taxes etc to allow those children to get an education and be supported financially to an extent. The alternative would be awful. I believe fully in women being able to choose to not have children, but I also think where women do want children there needs to be enough financial support to allow that to happen. Ultimately society works on the basis there will be younger generations coming behind the current ones who will eventually work and pay taxes etc, but I don't think anyone should be made to feel guilty about not having children.

I think people will need to accept migration may need to increase in the future to get more working age people in the country who can contribute to the taxes to support the growing older population

I find this a really weird angle. Realistically everyone should try and cover their own costs from the cradle to the grave. So in this scenario, child free people aren't contributing to the education budget to fund other people's children's education but simply repaying the state's investment in their own education. Presumably their family got help in the form of Child Benefit and potentially other benefits when raising them? We all had access to healthcare as children and parks etc. Why do child free people so often forget this?

I am frequently told that paying taxes is the price we pay for a civilised society. That's what child free people get for their money. You are entitled to healthcare etc the same as everyone else.

Studies have consistently shown that most families end up spending a large sun of money to raise each child and each future worker. Child free people need these people and really should be grateful to families for taking the brunt of the cost and contributing so much time and energy to raise children. They are undoubtedly the net beneficiaries of the whole enterprise from a financial perspective. Even if they paid more tax than parents they still probably wouldn't contribute in tax what it actually costs to raise a child or numerous children.

What is so terrible about being in care? I spent several years visiting my late DM in care and if I get to the stage where I can no longer look after myself properly I will be more than happy to let someone else take care of me. Mum always said she would never go into care, once she was there she thrived.

All decisions have natural consequences. We have been largely sheltered by this as a society due to the welfare state but if you stripped this away then it would be more obvious. We simply can't afford to maintain the current welfare state so some of the protection from the realities of our decisions will be removed.

If you chose not to invest in a private pension then you may find it more precarious relying on a state pension alone.
If you chose not to have children then you will have saved an awful lot of money etc from making this decision. Great! But is it really fair to expect those that did have to invest heavily in their children to also fund the consequences of you not having children?

Even if you have children, relying on them to look after you in your old age is foolish and naive. They may move abroad, they may not be able to (or not want to) help you or they may just not have the time. There are many people whose adult children only bother to see them a couple of times a year, if that.

My parents are only 20 years older than me, if they get to the point where they need lots of help in their old age, I won’t be a spring chicken myself. Plus I’ll probably be working until 70 odd so won’t have the time either.

But we are already paying into society for those things.

And I certainly don’t feel guilty for being an economically active member of society who had chosen not to increase the financial burden for 18 years by having children.

But posters seem to think that I should be penalised for that choice (as apparently do several other countries). Taking more money to support families means the childfree will have less to save, leaving them skint in retirement.

If this were the case, there would be no incentive for most people to work (if you are paying enough for SAHP to do that and the childfree decide not to work and lose most of what they earn).

Now that’s not a good look to any society.

And fwiw I’m not against migration in the slightest - I think it’s a possible solution