Ted.....the average age of the population is steadily rising, which puts increasing pressure on the ability to fund state pensions. So why have state pensions at all??
Because the alternative is to allow people to either starve/freeze to death in the streets or to work themselves to death because they simply can't afford to maintain any standard of living after 'retirement'.
l Why not just lower or abolish National Insurance and let the average person decide where or how he or she wants to fund his own pension?
What happens to the large number of people who never earn enough to pay significant amounts of national insurance?
On minimum wage, you would earn roughly £12100/yr, working 48 weeks a year and 40 hours a week.
That gives you national insurance charges payable on roughly £4352.
At 12% that means you would pay roughly £522 a year in national insurance.
Considering that many pension funds are these days barely able to keep pace with inflation, that means that after 40 years of work you will be able to accumulate National Insurance payments of £20880.
However the National Insurance take is larger than the state pension provision's cost, which means only 75% of NI payments could be abolished if the State Pension was scrapped, reducing us to roughly £15660.
I wonder how long you would last with only £15660 to live on as your retirement pot if you had just spent 40 years in minimum wage employment (which is going to be the future for a large part of the work force, assuming they can even get full time employment for the equivalent of 40 years which is far from certain in this job market) and thus didn't have much in the way of assets (and certainly didn't own a house to use as capital).
The qualifying age for state pension is also rising.....by the time I get there it will probably be 70. But what if I want to make my own free choice of retiring at 60? I clearly cant rely on the state to do that....
You can't rely on the state to give you an extra decade of retirement for nothing? Wow that is really hard for you :roll:
The fact that your life expectency is rather longer than it was for someone of your age when the 60 retirement age was set shouldn't come into it?
It seems reasonable to me that it should be locked to life expectancy and thus should climb/fall every year as the figures are updated.
Then again I think that about extending the educational period provided by the state for free as well....
isnt is also true that a good number of UK pension funds benefit from overseas investments state or private.....including the Railway Industries own pension group which does have such instruments in its asset portfolio...
The problem is that a rather large fraction of the workforce will never have significant pension funds simply
because they can't afford to pay into them.
Especially since many will be self employed workers and thus not eligible for matching funds from their employer.
In terms of having brand new state of the art facilities ...yes. I m at an advantage here....I actually worked in one till fairly recently, and I can safely state that the equipment the NHS was able to procure for its clinics was somewhat a lot more higher quality than it would have been able to the old fashioned way.
As i said, the patient certainly benefitted treatment wise..
This is simply because the Treasury wanted to keep public borrowing down for short term political advantage and thus prevented them from spending the same amount of money that the private sector was able to.
If you sum up all the money the NHS will end up paying for the facility and then work backwards using public sector borrowing rates you would discover they could have gotten more if they had done it 'the old fashioned way'.
It is the Treasury syndrome of increasing the life cycle cost in favour of reducing the short term cost.
(sorry couldn't resist). But seriously, human rights situation in China continues to be very poor, esp for minority groups.
