Monday 24 May 2010

Truth, but... (for @sfj1642 )

Sorry, but if you decide to have kids, you pay for them yourself. Why should I subsidise your lifestyle choices?

-- sfj1642 on twitter


In a sane world, that would be a perfectly reasonable point of view. Unfortunately, back here in the real world, the fact of the matter is this: those kids will one day be paying your (state) pension, your (state) healthcare and any other state benefits or services you may depend on. The state does not make provision for the future, it pays its historical "future debts" out of current cash flow.

That is why it is so vital to the governments of the future that population in the UK continues to grow, whether through immigration or through population growth. If the population ceased to grow, there would not be enough money left for the government to meet the commitments it made generations ago to people still around today.

And changing this is one of the best arguments for changing from a social democrat model of government to a libertarian one: future costs have to be properly funded. Just look at how many pension time bombs are ticking away because of the statist model today. It's not going to get any better by itself.

It's going to hurt some people, probably. But if we don't do it voluntarily and in a carefully-considered manner -- and soon! -- we could really see pensioners dying in the streets, either during my lifetime or those of my children.

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

An expanding population spreads the funding of old people more thinly than a static one, but it is still the working population that 'funds' support for the elderly.

By funds, I mean provides. However rich a 80 year old geriatric maybe he still has to have his arse wiped by a younger person even if he pays them £50 a time.

In more primative societies the elderly walk off into the snow to perish a la Capt. Oats so as not to be a burden on the younger generation. To put it another way if I as a geriatric were to be shipwrecked alone onto a desert island together with £1 million in gold, or cash or anything else I'd perish without help from a younger generation.

It is all a great con. The young look after the old in the hope that they in turn will be looked after in their dotage.

Money and funding has little to do with it.

ejoftheweb said...

yes but it doesn't make any difference how you fund pensions, someone has to be around in the future to do the work to make the money to pay them. Either it goes via taxes and the state, or it goes via private profits and dividends, but it must still be done, and you will also need someone to empty your bedpan and wipe your crumbling arsecrack in your dotage who will expect to be paid a living wage... financial engineering in pensions don't change a thing, it's all about conning us now to pay into fucking useless funds with some vague promise of a pittance in the future provided that is no gang of city wanktards hoovers what remains of the money up their capacious nostrils.

Face it, we're going to have to work until we're nearly dead. Everything else is ideological magic which simply won't work. But it's not unreasonable to expect to maintain some sort of dignity in our dotage, if we do the same for those now growing old.

We just can't expect to have the long healthy retirement that we've been paying our parents to have. We should never have lowered the retirement age from 70 and it should rise with increasing longevity.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

"Money and funding has little to do with it."

But since so few people actually care for their own elders at the moment, the money and funding provides a proxy for that care.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

"We should never have lowered the retirement age from 70 and it should rise with increasing longevity."

Excellent idea.

Umbongo said...

The problem is that the majority of those children who are produced solely by courtesy of the taxpayer are just the drones who will not support us in our old age but will be the parasites of the future. They will have imbibed with their mother's milk that the world owes them a living. They will have to be supported all their lives by the taxpayer not just towards the end of their lives. The ones who have been self-supporting all their lives and who have saved for a pension make it possible for there to be investment (savings, by the way, translate into investment) such that productivity increases and this, in turn, makes an increase in population unnecessary.

BTW, immigration from outside Northern and Western Europe (+ Australasia and N America) has enormous social costs, or hadn't you noticed. What keeping or creating or importing drones at the taxpayers' expense has to do with any kind of libertarianism is a mystery - to me at any rate.

Roger Thornhill said...

How much tax does the younger generation pay vs the cost of that generation's kids, remembering that many arrive as adults and pop sprogs out at a rate of knots...

It costs £5k/kid/year. Family of 4 is £20k per year. And that is just education.

So in the Fabian attempt to import young adults, we get spit-roasted.

What ever way you look at it, the SocDem/Fabian/Welfarist model was, is and will be unaffordable.

Mark Wadsworth said...

It's simpler than that.

We were all children once, and most of our parents will have claimed Child Benefit for us, so to refuse to pay it out to the next generation is rank hypocrisy.

As a separate issue, Child Tax Credits (mainly a bung for yer council house single mum) should be scrapped and flat rate child benefit hiked to £30+ per week for the first three kids in each family.

Anonymous said...

People are living too fucking long.

Logans Run at 70, people.

They won't be strong enough to overcome at that age, will they?

:o)

Bristol Dave said...

those kids will one day be paying your (state) pension, your (state) healthcare and any other state benefits or services you may depend on.

Not necessarily, it depends on if they can be arsed to work or not. There seem to be an alarming number of kids bred now that have no real intention of ever working (taking after Mummy & Daddy). Going on socio-economic trends, if the raising of these kids depends solely on the benefits paid by working people, then this is a fairly likely outcome.

Joe Public said...

Pensions, the ponziest of Ponzi schemes

Anonymous said...

Obo has kids???? The wonders of Rohypnol :)

ejoftheweb said...

umbongo said
"BTW, immigration from outside Northern and Western Europe (+ Australasia and N America) has enormous social costs, or hadn't you noticed."
er well no actually I hadn't. I live in Brixton which is a much better place for having lots of immigrants.

But I look at the new arrivals who shop in my local Lidl buying tinned tomatoes by the trolley-load, women working two jobs to pay the rent on the flat owned by some middleclass kids on a buy-to-let mortgage with a deposit funded by granny's will (yeah, I know, better there than in a pension fund), one in the daytime doing home cleaning for cash for their landlords' friends, one on the books at nights cleaning their offices, and I think fuck me we need more people like this in this country who are actually willing to do a proper day's work.

Roue le Jour said...

I'm sorry, Obo, why are to peddling socialist dogma? The error of socialism is to assume the masses are interchangeable units. Thus, a poor person is just a rich person with no money, a fat slob is just a fit bloke with no access to a sports centre, a criminal is just an honest person who has made some mistakes.

People are not interchangeable. Paying career claimants to produce more of the same or importing cheap foreigners, whose children won't work cheap and don't have the skills to work dear, will not work. The next generation needs to be the right kind of people or we are worse off than if we didn't have them.

Furor Teutonicus said...

Have a look at the amount of these immigrants are;

Working on the black.

Claiming state benefits from day of arrival. Even if they ARE worjking (Child allowance claimed for batards back home, for example).

In jobs that pay ENOUGH for them to be taxed.

And, with the Poles, in the country long enough to make a difference.

Then come back and tell me this is a "cure" for the future pension problems.

Anonymous said...

Roll on the day when Aljahom hits seventy.BTW does anyone know how old that bastard is?

Obnoxio The Clown said...

Furor, those problems are welfare problems, not immigration problems. If the welfare system wasn't so generous, people wouldn't come here for it. They'd come here for the right reasons.

At Work said...

Marks Wadsworth

We were all cannibals once, and most of our parents will have fed long pig to us, so to refuse to give long pig to the next generation is rank hypocrisy.

It's a pyramid scheme - in the long term it won't work. One way or another it will fail. To hold people to ransom on the basis that they benefited from a system that that pre-existed their ability to give consent is nonsense. Rank nonsense

Devil's Kitchen said...

"That is why it is so vital to the governments of the future that population in the UK continues to grow, whether through immigration or through population growth. If the population ceased to grow, there would not be enough money left for the government to meet the commitments it made generations ago to people still around today."

*sigh*

No. If GDP continues to grow but the population falls, then we have a higher GDP per capita.

The government raises the same amount of tax (all other things being equal), but has to fund fewer people.

Win.

DK

Phonetic WV: phaling

Obnoxio The Clown said...

Yes, you're quite correct, BUT that does become more and more difficult if the government continues to grow. And since iDave (for all his pretty words) doesn't look like he's actually going to make the state smaller or less intrusive ...

Furor Teutonicus said...

D.K. I theory aye.

BUT whilst the population is falling, the amount that need funding, for pensions, etc, is rising as a percentage of GDP.

And where does GDP come from if there is no one left in the ountry except the politicians?