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kzb

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Everything posted by kzb

  1. They started calling it a "benefit" some years ago now, long before the new state pension. I don't like it either. They could call it "contribution-based pension" to differentiate it from "pension credit", in the same way we have "contribution based" jobseekers allowance. On the other hand it is very much paid out of recent NICs. There is only about one year in reserve; there was never a long-term investment fund. The idea that we contribute in order to benefit later is a good one and needs strengthening not weakening. This is much stronger in European countries actually.
  2. That word you used. The projection in the post to which you were supposedly replying.
  3. Irrelevant. The projections are based on life expectancy, earnings, fertility and migration. I dread to think what the same projections would look like in France, Spain or Italy.
  4. This plot is interesting. It shows the forecast NIF balance from forecasts made in 2015 and 2020. What a difference. The forecasts are only 5 years apart, but the 2015 forecast was clearly very pessimistic. In the five years between forecast the fund exhaustion occurs fully ten years later. Now I am not saying the 2020 forecast will turn out as wrong as the one from 2015. The pandemic will have hit the NIF hard. But maybe the idiots Hunt and Sunak looked at this plot and thought we can afford to cut this.
  5. OK I failed to notice the reference at the bottom of the plot. It turns out to be outdated (from 2010) and I've now found the 2020 version. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-actuarys-quinquennial-review-of-the-national-insurance-fund-as-at-april-2020 Just think, @Unmoderated, only a couple of days ago people said I was lying that there was such thing as a National Insurance Fund. But look at all these careful analyses we have found about it since. Pretty good for a made-up fund out of my own imagination I must say. Anyhow it looks very interesting but got to dash now.
  6. When is that plot from? Is that the situation with this year's changes (i.e. -4%) or before ?
  7. The problem is we are signed up to CPTPP so I don't know how that would work. Also do you recall CANZUK ? But certainly an interesting idea.
  8. Certainly there is no comparison with the post-war years. It is ridiculous to say we are going to be worse off than in 1946.
  9. Then again I always used to beat the postcards home when on holiday. In fact a lot of them never arrived. Their post service was worse than ours back then. I don't think the health service is as good as you think either. Don't you have to pay to see a doctor ? Anyhow, you would think they'd be grateful after taking all that subsidy from the UK via the EU, for all those years. For about 40 years we've been paying to build their country up at the expense of our own. In fact we're still paying to this day.
  10. But all you can expect is benefits. After retirement age that is Pension Credit. They're not going to "pick up all the tabs" for you, and I doubt there can be many that are so deluded they think this will happen.
  11. We've been expecting collapse at least since Thatcher if not before, but it's never happened yet. The "debt" is largely owed to ourselves and is at least partially fictitious. That's right, and it is going to be even more unpopular if they abolish NI completely as they've been saying. Or maybe they realise the next election is lost whatever they do, so the objective is to leave Labour with as many problems as possible. The NI fund will likely gradually lose money after these cuts, and Labour will have to increase NI again in the future. On the plus side, I suspect the triple lock is safer under Labour than the Tories.
  12. Well it looks like @Unmoderated et al got their way with this budget ! The maximum benefit occurs for well-off employees on £50-60k, and zero benefit for pensioners. It's almost as if the Tories are doing exactly what these people want. They are even saying that abolishing NI is a target. I wonder if we'll be getting people on here saying how marvellous this Tory budget was ?
  13. The comparison is with 2019. Numbers of nurses and doctors have increased since then. "Type 1! attendances seem roughly the same, and emergency admissions are reduced: To add to that the outpatient appointments are fewer compared to 2019. So on these measures of output, we have more staff but less treatment overall. What evidence do you have for increased output ?
  14. Change the rules so they only get the state pension if they actually live here. No going back home and getting the UK state pension. The triple lock will have to go at some point, granted, it is an arithmetical certainty. But not yet, because we are still a long way behind comparable countries with our state pension. Pretty well every European country has a more generous state pension than us. I'm not sure if I recall the country correctly, it may be the Netherlands, where the average state pension is 106% average earnings. Both Spain and Italy pay something like 90% of earnings as a pension, and they live longer than us. Germany is 50% of average earnings (falling to 48% next year), and of course average earnings are significantly higher than here.
  15. I support the petition. Largely because the life expectancy increase won't happen as was assumed. But I don't have much sympathy with your outlook. If the UK pension is going to collapse, what about the much more generous French, Spanish, Italian..etc pensions? Why is our relatively poor state pension "unaffordable", and theirs isn't ?
  16. All oil has to be landed at a UK port by law. All the gas comes to the UK first also, and there are only limited options for exporting it direct. It's all subject to UK taxes and helps the UK balance of payments. It therefore contributes very significantly to UK government revenue and provides well-paid jobs. It comes to us first, and if anything serious happened we could pass laws to keep it, quite easily. Or we could get rid of all that and import it all instead.
  17. So right there you have a seriously screwed up idea of things. Firstly you need children as future tax payers, part of which is funding pensions. Second, as has been said many times on here, the UK state pension is one of the poorest in the developed world. It is certainly not "big" compared to other countries. Third, the UK GDP as grown enormously in real terms over the decades. Contributions to UK plc made back then are worth several times their cash value by now.
  18. As others have said, yes it does depend on where you live in the UK. It's about £50k in England but lower in Scotland. What is funny on here is all the posters on higher rate income tax pleading for cuts for the top few per cent of the income distribution. But the joke is, they are also fiercely Labour or SNP supporting, as if those parties are the parties that will cut it for them. "You couldn't make it up", as they say.
  19. If the news is correct and we see this 4% cut in NI, that will take the employee NI rate back to rates last seen in 1981. As a latish boomer looking forward to retirement, that means I've spent my entire career paying more NICs than these moaners on here will be paying. Yet it's us that have had it easy and they are the victims of us.
  20. OK I understand your confusion. However the effect was indeed to increase the percentage of a generation that went to university. That was because under the old system only a relatively small number of places were available. When they made it something you paid for, they could offer a lot more places. Young people fell for the trick and here we are.
  21. I've had a quick look at that link and it seems to back up what the good doctor says. There are more clinical staff doing fewer treatments. BTW if you read him he is not saying they are doing nothing. He is saying the NHS finds more and more stuff to waste their time on.
  22. Altrincham is a town not a borough. It's in the borough of Trafford.
  23. Fact number one. There are far more clinical staff working in the NHS: ‘Hospitals had 15.8% more consultants, 24.6% more junior doctors, 19.5% more nurses and health visitors, and 18.5% more clinical support staff in January to July 2023 than in January to July 2019….’ Overall, around twenty per cent more clinical staff: ‘But in the first nine months of 2023, they had 4.3% fewer emergency admissions and 1.3% fewer non-emergency admissions than over the same period in 2019. They carried out 1.8% more outpatient appointments and 0.8% more treatments from the waiting list than in 2019. This means that the number of patients treated per staff member – one crude measure of productivity – has fallen substantially.’1 Fact number two. There has been no increase in clinical output. Which means that in the last four to five years, productivity has fallen by around twenty per cent. If it keeps going down at this rate, in twenty years’ time, the NHS will be doing nothing at all. https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2023/11/27/what-is-wrong-with-the-nhs-part-3/
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