British Baby Boomers' Socialism Has Eaten Up Youth's Wealth

[cashinmattress]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkNB3LLDBzQ

"Basically, the boomer's have eaten all the candy. They're the ones who had free education, free health care, and great job security, and now they've blown it, and the young people are angry."

Yep.

I wonder, is this beeb commentator now looking for work, as it is very anti-beeb speak with such rhetoric.

[Papa Serf]

Lets not forget car insurance for da yoof. I do actually feel sorry for them, buy a car for £600 and pay £2000 insurance and they are not all reckless behind the wheel.

[dubsie]

What point of socialism don't you understand. The last so called labour government was socialist in the slightest. There would have been no housing boom

under socialism, no financial mess etc etc.

[aa3]

A big problem with the baby boomers is they threw away the meritocracy Britain had. Meritocracy being seen as basically a patriarchical and reactionary idea.

France still has all that socialism and then some, and they are fine. But with their meritocracy and more pragmatic way of running things, their organizations like their health system are actually quite efficient. An examples of French pragmatism.. versus British baby boomer wishful thinking. With severely pre-mature babies who have major health problems, the French simply let them die. British surgeons manage to keep them alive for years. But the costs are unreal.

Wherever I look the British baby boomers have pushed insane ideas. Like inviting in people from the developing world with aids, and providing them health care and translators. Or in energy pushing wind and solar instead of realist options like coal and nuclear.

[General Congreve]

Lets not forget car insurance for da yoof. I do actually feel sorry for them, buy a car for £600 and pay £2000 insurance and they are not all reckless behind the wheel.

Apparently it has a lot to do with Brown legalising 'No win, no fee' law services. Claims have gone through the roof as a result.

[Executive Sadman]

BS

When the boomers had 'free education' in the 60s/70s/80s the top rates of tax were at various times 60, 83 even 98% (or 136% if you had investment income!). If they earnt big money they paid big taxes. Even the basic rate of tax for a time was 35%, almost as high as the 40% top rate for the period 1988-2008. I guess there was a small window between 1988 and 1998 when there were no tuition fees and no exhobiant income taxes, but for most boomers, that simply wasnt the case. These rates are far higher than would likely be proposed with a 'graduate tax'

House prices are a far bigger crime than tuition fees. No one forces you to go to uni, a house OTOH is pretty essential.

These selfish students just want capitalist rates of tax (ie none on them) with socialist levels of public services.

[ken_ichikawa]

Lets not forget car insurance for da yoof. I do actually feel sorry for them, buy a car for £600 and pay £2000 insurance and they are not all reckless behind the wheel.

Heh even with NCB and wrong side of 30 car insurance is still insane, I wanted to change my old civic for a small Kei car. Insurance company wanted £1700 Thats WITH 4years NCB, no claims, no points, and 10+ years driving experience as well as bike licence with 6 years NCB. AND pass plus. I put in a renwal for my civic and it came out over £1K!

Suffice to say when the insurance on the civic runs out it is going to be scrapped. The car I wanted to replace it with is only grp9 as well though admittedly it is or was a 660cc turbo Kei car. I tried with with no NCB just to have a look at the cost. There were no quotes below £7000

Suffice to say I'm sticking to a bike at <£100 a year insurance.

Edited December 12, 2010 by ken_ichikawa

[andybee33]

Apparently it has a lot to do with Brown legalising 'No win, no fee' law services. Claims have gone through the roof as a result.

I'll add that to my long list of reasons why GB will be the first against the wall when the revolutuion comes. Funny, I sat next to him on a plane once when he was Chancellor - I should have broken the window (he was in the window seat) and saved the following things;

1 - The sense of personal responsibility in British society

2 - The economy (natch)

3 - The 'real' housing ladder - the one where you start a family and move from your flat into a, erm, family home

4 - Probably quite a few suicides

Talk about missed opportunities.

[Executive Sadman]

On reflection i think the best year to be born was 1971. Go off to university in 1989, get through at little cost, miss the worst of the recession. Graduate to an improving economy by 1992, pay lowest rates of income tax in a generation, save a deposit for a home through 1992-1994 with fantastic savings rates, Buy cheap home in 1995, mortgages rates go down and down for the next few years. Life sorted.

If only i wasnt born 13 years too late.

[Mr. Miyagi]

Heh even with NCB and wrong side of 30 car insurance is still insane, I wanted to change my old civic for a small Kei car. Insurance company wanted £1700 Thats WITH 4years NCB, no claims, no points, and 10+ years driving experience as well as bike licence with 6 years NCB. AND pass plus. I put in a renwal for my civic and it came out over £1K!

Suffice to say when the insurance on the civic runs out it is going to be scrapped. The car I wanted to replace it with is only grp9 as well though admittedly it is or was a 660cc turbo Kei car. I tried with with no NCB just to have a look at the cost. There were no quotes below £7000

Suffice to say I'm sticking to a bike at <£100 a year insurance.

It must be the area you live in Ken. This years insurance was only £270 on a newish Saab I have 5 years no claims and 6 points.

[General Congreve]

Christmas is where children tell their parents what they want and the parents pay for it. The Deficit is where parents ask the government for what they want and get their children to pay for it.

Gramm

Very festive, like it.

[Errol]

Heh even with NCB and wrong side of 30 car insurance is still insane

Eh? I can insure a small hot hatch (2 ltr 172bhp. 0-60 in 6 seconds), 10yrs old, for £300 a year.

[Mikhail Liebenstein]

Heh even with NCB and wrong side of 30 car insurance is still insane, I wanted to change my old civic for a small Kei car. Insurance company wanted £1700 Thats WITH 4years NCB, no claims, no points, and 10+ years driving experience as well as bike licence with 6 years NCB. AND pass plus. I put in a renwal for my civic and it came out over £1K!

Suffice to say when the insurance on the civic runs out it is going to be scrapped. The car I wanted to replace it with is only grp9 as well though admittedly it is or was a 660cc turbo Kei car. I tried with with no NCB just to have a look at the cost. There were no quotes below £7000

Suffice to say I'm sticking to a bike at <£100 a year insurance.

That is quite discriminatory really - my A8 4.2 FSi only costs me £700 PA Fully Comp and I'm 36.

[ken_ichikawa]

It must be the area you live in Ken. This years insurance was only £270 on a newish Saab I have 5 years no claims and 6 points.

Yes I know. People always wandering up and down the street asking have I seen their cars.

M Manchester

1-9, 11-24, 40, 60 . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . Refer

25-29, 32, 34-35, 38, 43, 45-46 . . . . . . . . F *

30-31, 33, 41, 44 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . E *

[cells]

BS

When the boomers had 'free education' in the 60s/70s/80s the top rates of tax were at various times 60, 83 even 98% (or 136% if you had investment income!). If they earnt big money they paid big taxes. Even the basic rate of tax for a time was 35%, almost as high as the 40% top rate for the period 1988-2008. I guess there was a small window between 1988 and 1998 when there were no tuition fees and no exhobiant income taxes, but for most boomers, that simply wasnt the case. These rates are far higher than would likely be proposed with a 'graduate tax'

House prices are a far bigger crime than tuition fees. No one forces you to go to uni, a house OTOH is pretty essential.

These selfish students just want capitalist rates of tax (ie none on them) with socialist levels of public services.

Individual taxes are largely irrelevant you need to look at the whole tax rate. Currently it is nearly 50%. That is to say half the economy is the government.

At the turn of the last century it was about 10%. I don’t know what it was in the 60s/70s but I would be surprised if it were higher than today.

No one forces you to go to uni

Well considering that contract law doesn’t apply to minors for good reason why should it apply to a 17 year old being sold a dream yet delivered a nightmare?

You as an adult have the life experience to reasonably consider the pros and cons of university and £30-60k perhaps more debt. A 17 year old in most circumstances would not have ever had more than £100 in their wallet let alone know what signing upto 50k in debt really means.

In short the majority of children aged 17 have not the mental capacity or life experience to make an informed decision so asking them to make such a decision is immoral.

BTW it don’t help with all the propaganda about uni being a great thing and jobs at the end of it, plus the fact that when so many go you need a degree to stack shelves now it means less and less options at 17 other than uni & hope!

On top of all this the government spends £700B a year. You sure that each of those 700 Billions is more deserving than not saddling hundreds of thousands of kids with tens of thousands in debt? I would say you could quite easily have free university if we cut back on just 2% of current government spending elsewhere. You saying more than 98% of what the government does right now is vital and useful?

The whole thing is a farce and it will take a generation before people wake up to the con

[miko]

BS

When the boomers had 'free education' in the 60s/70s/80s the top rates of tax were at various times 60, 83 even 98% (or 136% if you had investment income!). If they earnt big money they paid big taxes. Even the basic rate of tax for a time was 35%, almost as high as the 40% top rate for the period 1988-2008. I guess there was a small window between 1988 and 1998 when there were no tuition fees and no exhobiant income taxes, but for most boomers, that simply wasnt the case. These rates are far higher than would likely be proposed with a 'graduate tax'

House prices are a far bigger crime than tuition fees. No one forces you to go to uni, a house OTOH is pretty essential.

These selfish students just want capitalist rates of tax (ie none on them) with socialist levels of public services.

Your tax figures are missleading .

Basic rate tax was 33% in the 70s , however NI which is also an income tax was 6.75 % coupled with the fact in real terms tax free allowances were higher ( they have been frozen many times in the last 30 years ) the basic take from average wage was lower then than now. As for the 60 83 and the super tax at 98% , very few people hit those dizzy heights , many more people now hit the 40% bracket than hit the 60% bracket back then.

The raseing of NI and freezing of tax free allownaces have been the biggest con,s in the last 30 years and both labour and tory have played that game. Let's not forget vat has gone from 10% down to 8.5% then back up to 15% , 17.5% and is now due to hit 20%.

Edited December 12, 2010 by miko

[Self Employed Youth]

Lets not forget car insurance for da yoof. I do actually feel sorry for them, buy a car for £600 and pay £2000 insurance and they are not all reckless behind the wheel.

My postcode.

£200 car, 1.0L

£3000 insurance.

£15000 car, 2.4L

£3000 insurance.

Essentially I must pay £3000 insurance.

Rent is £3000

Council tax is £1000

Utilities £1000

Food £1500

Travel £1500 (Public transport / Petrol, MOT, Tax)

NMW NET after tax/NI for 40 hours a week with 0 sick days = £10000

After the essentials I'm only left with £2000

Combined benefits ~ £7000 (but no need to travel)

Work incentive!

Heaven forbid a job lower than 40 hours or one I would need a car for.

Never mind, unemployment hasn't that much stigma among my generation, not many are working and the amount doing so is decreasing.

[Self Employed Youth]

Apparently it has a lot to do with Brown legalising 'No win, no fee' law services. Claims have gone through the roof as a result.

The many culprits being fellow unemployed people in my age range, but with no intention to work and a very high rate of claiming sickness benefits instead of unemployment (due to them being a lot higher).

[cashinmattress]

...university...

The whole thing is a farce and it will take a generation before people wake up to the con

Yep.

Most of it is pure farce.

· Agriculture

· Anthropology

· Applied Sciences

· Architecture and Design

· Area and Culture Studies

· Biology

· Business and Management

· Chemistry

· Computer Sciences

· Creative and Visual Arts

· Earth Sciences

· Economics

· Education and Teaching

· Engineering and Technology

· Environmental Sciences

· Formal Sciences

· Geography

· Health Sciences

· History

· Languages and Linguistics

· Law and Criminal Justice

· Life Sciences

· Literature

· Mathematics and Statistics

· Media Studies and Production

· Medicine

· Music

· Natural Sciences

· Performing Arts

· Philosophy

· Physics

· Political Sciences

· Psychology

· Religious Studies

· Social Sciences

· Sociology

· Transportation

· Writing and Communications

Anyone who lets their kids get into one of the struck out degree paths is either in the business and can get them work, or is a moron. Sure, they are great second degree's, but there's no value in that education as the work isn't there and won't be there.

A life of mediocrity and a bog roll degree boxed up with your other paperwork.

Freaking UK government has made us into a nation of 'book' smart lazy bastards.

[South Lorne]

What point of socialism don't you understand. The last so called labour government was socialist in the slightest. There would have been no housing boom

under socialism, no financial mess etc etc.

.....last Labour government under Brown was more like stalinism ....every Socialist Labour Government I have seen overspends ...and Callahan called in the IMF before the winter of discontent ....your rewrite of history is a bit like fiction ....

[JJJ]

Anyone who lets their kids get into one of the struck out degree paths is either in the business and can get them work, or is a moron. Sure, they are great second degree's, but there's no value in that education as the work isn't there and won't be there.

Architecture too? Are we going to stop building things?

[Orsino]

On reflection i think the best year to be born was 1971. Go off to university in 1989, get through at little cost, miss the worst of the recession. Graduate to an improving economy by 1992, pay lowest rates of income tax in a generation, save a deposit for a home through 1992-1994 with fantastic savings rates, Buy cheap home in 1995, mortgages rates go down and down for the next few years. Life sorted.

If only i wasnt born 13 years too late.

I was born in 1971 and would agree that we had a far better financial deal than today's students, but our youth was also a transitional period that bred a culture of apathy and hedonistic escapism. As a generation we were ill equipped to deal with new forces like job insecurity, globalisation and the Internet revolution and have often been playing catch-up while picking up the fag ends of the boomer lifestyle. We have lived much of our lives in a world built by boomers for boomers. Today's students are forging their own future rather than meekly accepting society as they find it. Frankly I think they put my generation to shame and these are exciting times. I still think the music was better in 88-89 though.

[dissident junk]

Not sure about the idea that it is "baby boomers' socialism" per se.

I think the issue is that British redistributive fiscal policies would have worked if we had retained the empire and the hard industrial base of the 19th century. However, we lost everything -- wealth, trade advantage etc -- after the second world war (we lost a fair bit after the first), but no one ever really made that clear to the post-war generations, some of whom's members saw a perfect opportunity to instigate the radical policies for "social fairness" that had been created as a set of answers in another epoch.

To me, the hard fact is that the kind of wealth and economic strength that would make redistributive policies work is just not there anymore, so the burden has fallen on the working man or woman -- in short, the serpent is eating its own tail. This is why we now have a scenario where many working people have become poorer than the unemployed.

I think boomers were just at the transitional point where the old world began its death rattles, but the harshness of the new reality had not yet fully hit. Plus they had the benefit of a largely closed labour economy and the advantage of lack of competition from the generations above (lost generation and the silent generation ... all of whom lost serious numbers in war).

I've mentioned it before on HPC, but I do think much of what we expect and see as being normal (meritocracy, social mobility et al) is actually only the consequences of a particular and peculiar blip in history that coincided exactly with the baby-boomer generation.

[cashinmattress]

Architecture too? Are we going to stop building things?

It's a dying trade. Job prospects are bleak and the pay is sh1te unless you are in the top percentile, plus Britain ain't building grand structures like we used to.

[cells]

Yep.

Most of it is pure farce.

Anyone who lets their kids get into one of the struck out degree paths is either in the business and can get them work, or is a moron. Sure, they are great second degree's, but there's no value in that education as the work isn't there and won't be there.

A life of mediocrity and a bog roll degree boxed up with your other paperwork.

Freaking UK government has made us into a nation of 'book' smart lazy bastards.

Even those degrees which most would consider hard and worthwhile are useless to 90% plus of those who take them. For example I know one guy who is a Cambridge graduate of the 50s who did electrical engineering. I would put that degree right up there as the hardest of the hard and worthwhile. However the man runs a pottery company and sells clay and other pottery related stuff for a living. He makes a good living off it, a millionaire, but id be dammed if he uses anything he learnt from his electrical engineering in his business.

I did physics at university and the most advanced thing I used in work was Fourier math to write some analysis program. Things I could have done with my a-levels. However most the time the most advanced education I use for what I do is frekin multiplying sums which I could do aged 10.

IMHO university was the web forum of the old. Where intelligent people could get together with like minded people and discuss the world and life and politics and do science and math and astronomy with people interested in those things. There was no real need for it in that the real world did not need 99.9999999% of those people. Sure you had the one in 10 million who went on to use their minds and further humanity but they probably would have done that anyway.

I would suggest even advanced jobs like designing turbines or jet engineers is more of an on the job learning job than a university job.

University as an institution for teaching is redundant imo. It was/is a place of discussion/for intelligent people debating difficult things however now so is the internet.

Unfortunately universities have been degraded so much I would say you get more intelligent debate here than even the top universities of the country. Sadly because of the general ignorance of employers I would say universities are actually harming society now. We would be better off without them completely than the current system. Now you seriously need a degree to work in retail. You have no choice but to make that investment. I know 5-6 people working in a jewellery store who all have degrees. They don’t need it to do their jobs but they would not get those jobs without the degrees. University is now self feeding self sustaining pot of wealth/time destruction.

I really despair thinking about this mess.