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

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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?

I didn't think of it that way. Nice

I hope all these private pensions pay out in the future as they should. But with my tinfoil hat, on I'd be a bit worried about it in the current, and possibly continuing, economic climate, where it's hard to foresee what will be happening almost on a month to month basis now.

The economy’s been much further down the toilet than this more than once in my lifetime and still people have got their pensions.

The economy’s been much further down the toilet than this more than once in my lifetime and still people have got their pensions

Have we ever had such a long product of such little growth?

Indeed we have. We’ve had three major recessions in my lifetime in the 1970s, the 1990s and in 2008. This is nothing. When we start getting mass unemployment, house repossessions and people with negative equity handing their keys back to their mortgage lenders I’ll start to worry.

We’ve had three major recessions in my lifetime in the 1970s, the 1990s and in 2008. This is nothing

But we never recovered from 08, growth wise.

Actually despite the lack of growth since the pandemic pensions have been doing well. They’ve taken a hit since Trump started his war but they will recover. My DH has a draw down pension that despite drawing down the maximum he can tax free, has seen a growth of 17% so he still has about the same balance as when he started. My own private pension I’ve been stashing money in has not lost any money. It was doing much better until a couple of weeks ago but since I’m not planning to do anything with it yet there is time for it to improve.
My actual investment is fine. I started it to to reduce my tax on my self employed income. And will draw it down once I finish work completely.

I think that we've never fully recovered from the 1970s.If you don't remember the 70s, I do. The oil shock, the skyjacking, the three day weeks.

That doesn’t mean things can’t get worse.

Growth wise I thought we did? I do think some of the problems can be traced back to then but there were some positives which have been lacking post 08 eg home ownership rates increased significantly because prices were affordable, still a large amount of council homes available & wages saw really strong growth,

But my point was about the recovery of growth. It’s not rocket science to think if we continue on this trajectory of low growth things will get worse

My understanding was the 08 crash is considered the worst because it was the deepest recession since the 2nd WW. And previously the economy has “bounced back” from other recessions whereas today our incomes & productivity have never really recovered & don’t show any signs of doing so either.

The deepest recession was caused by Covid as shown by the third graph on the link. The point I’m trying to make is that the effects were less. The 70s and 90s recessions were brutal.

https://pearsonblog.campaignserver.co.uk/tag/real-economic-growth/

I know what you made in terms of there just not being any resources to go around any more.
After the 70s we produced things and then we stopped producing them
We became a nation of shopkeepers selling services to each other other
And at some point that’s running or has run out with the introduction of AI
They reckon about 40% of the people on the planet are surplus to requirement now so what do we do with them?
Trump appears to have come up with a plan just to irradiate them. If in doubt a good war seems to solve most Financial issues.

In a podcast Alistair Campbell and Liam Byrne - it seems that wages rising year on year plateaued in 2004-2005, much earlier than assumed - then we had 08 financial crisis, and then we had George Isborne’s austerity budget in ? 2010. Then Brexit (which normally A Campbell blames everything on) then Covid.
Meanwhile we brought i. Immigrants which lowered non professional wages and sent all manufacturing to China.
smug Tory Govs assumed financial services would keep us afloat while allowing everywhere outside London to struggle. And bought votes with upping state pension and benefits.
And here we are.

I don't think we genuinely recovered from the 90/91 crash. The noughties "boom years" were just an illusion based on debt and government spending so entirely artificial. After the 90's recession, we also stopped bothering about the balance of payments (trade) deficit, which we've "fudged" by encouraging foreign investors to buy British property, to make the balance of payments deficit less disastrous, but now we're trying to halt that flow as it's caused housing cost inflation and property shortages as many of the foreigners leave their properties empty and hold only for investment. Of course, the 50% aim for Unis also hid a lot of economic problems, by reducing the unemployment statistics and again increasing demand for housing (student flats etc) which likewise inflated housing costs.

Hoping to get by on my work pension though hopefully will (eventually) get a state pension as well

I think there was a bit of smoke and mirrors that happened in the 80s. It looked like a prosperous decade, despite the boom and bust housing market and high unemployment in areas which lost their industry. It looked prosperous because it was the era of keeping up with the Joneses and people were getting up to their neck in debt. Following Thatcher's pronouncement that we should be a nation of homeowners, there was a lot of irresponsible lending and a lot of repossessions. There was a veneer of 'success', but dig a little deeper and so much of it was on the never-never.

I think it's often remembered with rose tinted spectacles as a time of thriving economy, but so much industry either disappeared or was on its knees. A lot of communities built around those industries have never recovered.

The pain and worry that I have seen during recessions since the 1970s (when the value of my parents' house dropped 50% in 18 months) through the Thatcher years, to the 1990s when I knew people who could not keep paying the mortgage and HAD to put the keys through the bank drop slot to close off their occupancy. Losing the roof over your head is totally terrifying. Times are bad right now, but the 1970s and 1990s were worse, IMO.

We started too, growth was high in the early 2010s, then Austerity bit and the UK grew more slowly than any other comparable economy.

I firmly believe (one reason) low to zero wage growth forced our productivity to fall, why do anything extra or even work hard when you go work just to stay poor?

Now its embedded in the workforce... do the bare minimum to keep your job.

There’s always smoking mirrors with these situations, and some people will always prosper during a recession at other people’s expense
Look at the current situation with Trump. His coughs are being filled at the literal expensive Iranians lives.