Pensions Crisis Etc Continued

One of my friends tells me that he doesn't think I have really addressed the case of the money purchase pension schemes. I thought that I had done that in the opening of my previous posting, but for the sake of clarity I'll spell it out loud and clear. If you can afford to buy the pension you should be able to pay the tax. No party is going to re-instate that relief so stop whinging and pay your tax. If we can get the rich off welfare it will help us all, except the moaning middle classes.

The other problem is with public sector pensions. The impression that the papers give is that somehow public servants are going to get their state pensions 5 years ahead of the rest of us at age 60. They wont, thet will get that at 65 like the rest of us. What they will get at 60 is what in other occupations would have been an occupational pension. They forfeited income every week in order to build up that entitlement to a pension at 60 and that was the deal. Everyone involved knew that was the deal, it was part of their wages. The money held back from them was not, however, invested by their employer, the government, because they believed that current taxpayers would be able to pay these pensions when they became due. The economics of the madhouse.

Now, as the chickens come home to roost, they do not want to lose votes by burdening current taxpayers with the bill for these pensions which people have been working for for 40 years in some cases. So they think that they can just walk away from the problem by telling their employees that they have changed the rules because the agreement that they had is too expensive (politically) to honour. They want to delay the payment of these pensions which these people have worked for for 5 more years. and damn the agreements. Well you can't treat people like that and expect them to just suffer it, so you have a dispute. That's hardly a surprise, but if you can get the papers to put out your mis-information it will help get the public on your side, and it might not be noticed that this is a government with neither honesty nor honour. .