To think we can't afford the triple lock

[paddleboardingmum]

Things seem very weighted against young people right now in terms of tax, student loans, and then there's the cost of mortgages and childcare. I know there are some older people struggling and I do feel sorry for them. But plenty are not and I think we just can't afford the triple lock at the moment. AIBU

Where does this poster say that they were on benefits prior to retiring?

The point is though, there are already significant compounded additional costs due to the TL- the IFS has a very good explainer here: What do you need to know about the triple lock? | Institute for Fiscal Studies

While I agree that pensions needed to be increased to tackle significant pensioner poverty, the policy has achieved its aims (and in fact did that quite a while ago now, pensioners are now less likely to be poor than the working age population) and we could have had a more financially sustainable way of achieving that goal. I agree we need to settle on a method of uprating also.

Of course the actual future additional costs are triple lock costs - whatever method you use for future pensions uprating. Next year that looks about £600 million if you pegged to earnings but of course it permanently locks in that spending, and the impact compounds over time, especially as the number of pensioners is rapidly increasing.

The government also has to deal with incredibly high volatility though- inflation may well remain high (middle east conflict) which means there is a huge margin of error there. Costs by 2030 could be much much more. Plus there are the additional costs of pension credit as well, the state pension not being the only benefit pensioners receive.

Governments hate that level of unpredictability in costs- you can't invest in other things if you don't know how much money you've got. I don't think people realise how much the TL reduces government room for manoeuvre. Pensions are such a monumentally huge part of the budget.

My original point- that removing the aid budget, already cut to the bare minimum- won't pay for this, stands (plus that's not how government budgets work anyway, we have Thatcher to thank for the idea of running a country like a household which is comms nonsense).

Where it say they weren't.

Also are we just dealing with individual posters circumstances, or looking at wider issues ?

There were and are plenty of reasons to have done this 4 years ago...

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

Pensioners can claim help with housing costs, same as people on UC. Plus if they have additional needs they would be entitled to a top up via Pension Credit plus Attendance Allowance. If they were entitled to PIP before they reached pension age they would still get that.

When did we last have a dictatorship in the UK?

When people stopped reading properly.

That's very interesting.

UK definition of poverty in the UK is living in household with income below 60% of median.
So Labour spent billions of taxpayers money to lift CB cap to lift some children out of poverty.

Yet it's ok for pensioners to be on less than 30% of median income.

So all the current neets will fill the care worker vacancies?

They should, yes. Anything rather than signing on.

I was just responding to an individual post which detailed their circumstances. Had they said they were on benefits, I would not have posted, but they did not.

If we relax training and vetting. Which frankly is a scam anyway. I mean if you are British you clearly don't need DBS checks. It's not as if you are foreign is it ?

(MN have rapped my knuckles before for not signalling satire and allowing people to take it seriously. So I'd better flag it up before I get out on the naughty step. Again 😎)

Before we start targeting pensioners we need to close loopholes in corporation tax that allow multi-million pound businesses to at very little, we need to crack down on the use of tax avoidance schemes and we need sort out the waste in public services.

Fruit picking, deliveroo drivers, litter picking, communal services, cleaning parks
Warehouse workers - at least half of workers at Amazon warehouses are on visas

You've failed Hitchens razor

YABU

What we can't afford is the musical chairs of incompetance. It does not matter who runs Westminster: crap in = crap out.

Do you really believe the country will benefit if the triple lock is scrapped?

OK, I’ll be more blunt. Tytler was talking bollocks.

If he ever said it at all, which is doubtful.

The way it's been framed for most of most people's lives is that the stamp they pay, the NI contributions, are their most basic savings for retirement - just ones organised by the government.

It's been presented that way for so long - pay enough contributions and you qualify for a whole pension - that that's how people have naturally thought of it. Not as a handout in a crisis that you get for being destitute or having failed to save but as a basic entitlement, earned precisely by a type of saving in the form of the contributions (unlike people who didn't work and so didn't make those contributions). Private pensions were presented as extra, for a nicer retirement, to augment, not replace, the state pension.

It doesn't matter that that's not how it worked behind the scenes, that it's all been a bit of a Ponzi scheme. That language should have been changed ages ago to make it clear that those NI contributions are just another real-time tax and guarantee nothing in the future. You can't blame people for having believed that they did have an assured state pension in the future and that that's what the money taken out of their pay packet was going towards.

Yes and it wasn’t me!

Bloody hell. I'm almost a pensioner and have only just paid off my mortgage and am still working and paying off my student loan. The state pension is barely enough to survive on as it is.

Carers allowance is means tested.

The state pension isn’t a hand out. It’s a contributory benefit.

Pensions are about 5% of GDP, predicted to rise to closer to 9% over the next 50 years. That's just pensions, you can top those numbers up by a few percent if you add other old-age benefits.

Foreign aid spending is 0.5% of GDP and, following recent cuts, will drop to 0.3% next year.

Cutting the remaining 0.3% wouldn't even touch the sides of the aging-population, pension-spend problem.