£610 a week pension demand is insane

[Thisismyfinesthour]

Just read that there is an online petition doing the rounds for a £610 a WEEK pension demand to the government.
WTAF? Is the heat melting some peoples brains? It seems over 5000 have signed it.
Where do they think the money is coming from?

UC is in work and out of work benefit

If we are talking about fairness, context and contribution matter. Comparing someone who has been a net contributor for 30 or 40 years with someone who has only ever been a net recipient, purely on the basis of what each receives today, is meaningless. It tells you what they are receiving today, not how much they have contributed.

People should be supported when they need it, but fairness can't just be measured on what someone is receiving today.

Who are the wealthy? Because it seems to be anyone who earns more that £39K according to Labour.

So no one has posting anything to show that today’s pensioners paid more into the system then they took out?

Funny that!

The triple lock is a big part of why pensioners are getting more than they paid in…

Some have, some haven’t. There are many variables - the length of time they live, the amount they earned ergo the amount of tax they paid and are paying. Pensioners aren’t an homogeneous group.

It’s not pushing a narrative to say today’s pensioners have taken more out than they paid in!

Wow 😆😆😆

So where’s the evidence? Pre Covid articles penned by Tory MPs don’t cut it, by the way.

Always the same 😆😆

Apparently statistics and economic analysis by cohort are completely lost on some people.

That's not what the thread is about. It's not about whether pensioners have paid in more than they've taken out inless you're a sodding whinger who keeps wanting to have a dig. Seems to be a national pastime now...bashing the boomers. Start another thread about it and then you'll have all the comments that you're wishing for. FFS.

Apparently common sense is an alien concept to some.

Maybe someone actually tried a search engine and discovered they were wrong, by over £200k per pensioner in real-terms.

Try looking at the ONS data for a start. London and South East England are the only regions of the UK which contribute more rax revenue than they receive in welfare and services.

Maybe you were involved further down the line. I was involved in drafting the agreements - working for the PFI providers. We’d be in client meetings to work out what they couldn’t accept and what they hoped to get, then they would go into principals meetings with the ministers and get everything they’d ever hoped for without question.

The poor solicitors for the government had to watch their ministers give up every negotiating point for free.

The agreements are terrible - because the politicians and senior civil servants negotiating them had no understanding of the commercial position, didn’t bother to inform themselves and didn’t listen to any advice. There isn’t much you can do to ‘draft’ common sense into them.

https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/comment/the-system-has-worked-for-boomers-at-every-stage-of-their-lives/

Still waiting for something anything that says otherwise

This is brilliant 😆😆😆😆😆

That’s David Willetts’ opinion. Like most posters on this thread he expects to be taken at face value. The figures aren’t sourced or verifiable. It’s notable that both the links you’ve posted rely on The Resolution Foundation.

@Differentforgirls Thank you. From there I was able to get back to the 2019 origin of the claims. Now I'm going to have to try and get hold of Willets book, which I dont wish to pay for, to see if it is also unsubstantiated.

The world has changed considerably since 2019 with one of the big differences being the expansion of the number of pensioners paying tax. Between 1946 and around 2002 national debt dropped dramatically. So boomers were paying down the debt of the war years, paying off the debt from abolishing slavery and still managing to save into their personal pensions so they could look forward to a decent retirement. So they certainly were not aiming to screw over subsequent generations, they were reducing the debt burden on them.

Then came the financial crisis, the government shares in banks being sold back with an economic loss of about £10.5 billion for taxpayers and covid with Boris's contracts for his mates and £10.9 billion in fraud, error, and waste. Dont know about you but I didnt vote for any of that.

Comedy sketch level gold, isn’t it?

From a review of the book "Willetts is candid about the fact that "there are no authoritative estimates of the distribution of the £6.7 trillion of wealth in our country between the ­different age groups" and relies instead on the assertion that "there are good ­reasons to believe" the boomers have got more than their fair share.

and "Willetts might have done better to take as his main theme the links between family, education and social mobility, since on these issues he is on firmer ground. In fact, his title could just as easily have been The Big Grab: How the Rich Are Using Money and Marriage to Buy the Future for Their Kids."

The rich do control the narrative and benefited from both the bank crisis and covid. Sounds very much like a distraction from how wealth is built and privilege protected.

AND SCOTLAND IS THE THIRD. It’s like trying to post to a chipolata sausage.

Ditto.

A very small proportion of current pensioners have been net contributors at all at any point in life let alone over their entire lifetimes.