Research on life expectancy and birth rates shows that ill health makes status quo unsustainable
    •  Baggins   ( @baggins@beehaw.org ) English
      4•5 months ago

      I’d like to give you an extra upvote for your username :-)

      Don’t know about 65+ but I’m 67 in a few weeks and only started my current job two and a half years ago. I think if you don’t look or act like a doddery old git, and you have the qualities and outlook required, you’re in with a chance. My role for instance is far better suited to a more ‘mature’ person. They’ve tried recruiting younger people but most of the ones they took on were not reliable or not up to the job! Some places like B&Q look to older people as they have a wealth of knowledge, Tesco etc. as older people can turn up at 0600 as opposed to others that turn the alarm off and go back to sleep because they’ve been on the piss until 0400. Obviously there will be exceptions to the rule, but just look at the number of older people staffing the supermarkets. Where I work and across our network of centres there are very few under 50.

      It’s pants. My daughter (22) will probably have to wait until past 71 at this rate. Some will never be able to stop working.

  •  driving_crooner   ( @driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br ) 
    7•5 months ago

    Raising the age of retirement is just one of the couple of ways you can reach actuarial equilibrium. The other two are lowering the retirement benefits, or raising the contributions, by the participants or by the sponsor. Everyone of those methods os as useful as the others, but the last one requires taxing, this is why you never listen to politicians talking about how thats an alternative. Tax the rich as they should be, and this is a solved problem.

  •  wewbull   ( @wewbull@feddit.uk ) English
    4•5 months ago

    Well. I think it was inevitable that the government Ponzi scheme collapsed. Like all such schemes, they only work when there’s more people paying-in at the bottom than are extracting value at the top. Our demographics are showing that wasn’t being sustained for quite a while now.

    Government pensions are sold to us as a savings fund, but they just aren’t. Pension funds in general are horribly misused. Nobody in our society can bear that money placed with them to be there for some future dates should be unused.

  •  AutoTL;DR   ( @autotldr@lemmings.world ) BEnglish
    2•5 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The retirement age will have to rise to 71 for middle-aged workers across the UK, according to research into the impact of growing life expectancy and falling birthrates on the state pension.

    “But if you bring preventable ill health into the equation, that would have to increase even more,” added Mayhew, who is also professor of statistics at Bayes Business School and has advised the government on rises to the state pension age multiple times as a senior civil servant and in his current roles.

    Jonathan Cribb, associate director and head of retirement at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said that while he did not disagree with a higher pension age, increasing it without addressing other cost-saving measures was not “realistic or equitable”.

    He added: “It would disproportionately impact poorer individuals whose ill-health means they have shorter lives, and so who receive pensions for less time.”

    The Intergenerational Foundation, an independent thinktank, agreed that the pension age had to rise, but questioned on whose shoulders that cost should fall.

    “Increasing the state pension age would be a terrible policy – a really bad way of attempting to make people more productive,” he said.

    The original article contains 825 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!