Solve the Pensions Crisis: Equal Suffering for All…
Am I dreaming or something: without at all denying that Ireland has a pensions crisis (with about 1/3 to be added to the pensions bill in the next 25 years, as opposed to the UK’s ±10%), why is it that the financial meltdown has focused people’s attention on public sector pensions? More particularly, people are absolutely right that it is unfair that workers in the public sector have good pensions while those in the private sector have ones where the individual takes on all the risk associated with posting their savings in the casino door in the hope that, when they retire, the markets will be on a good run. It is very unfair.
But since when is it a good solution to insist that, if I have a shit pension and you have a good one, we should both have shit pensions?
Surely people would be better served to ask why it is that a return to a decent state pension, paid for out of taxes, is not an option. Why are they forced to bet their savings on the markets? And added to that, why are the people who manage those savings doing such a bad job?
I couldn’t agree more. Everyone should have a decent state pension rather than having a flutter at the financial betting shop, aka getting a private pension. Only a state pension is flexible enough to provide whatever a person needs, for as long as they need it, or alternatively to provide nothing if the person has died. With a private pension however you have to guess how much you will need and for how long, and keep paying even if you drop dead before you claim. And then be completely powerless if the roulette wheel halves your pension fund in months.
Thanks Nick. I suppose that I’m serious about the state pension not being an option in the UK or Ireland, given various other choices the ’societies’ have made about the structures of the economy. For instance, Ireland’s status as the ‘most globalised’ economy might have something to do with its incapacity to increase taxes sufficiently to pay for pensions in this manner, even if that would most likely be, on an individual level, the most efficient and least costly coordination device for an ageing population.
Disciplinary neo-liberalism how are ye!