Exactly Hoof, when and where did this sense of entitlement come from ?

"i worked in Mcdonalds for 40 years therefore i deserve to live in a castle when I die is the latest battle cry of the great unwashed
,"

No you bloody don't. You provide for your own future, why should the Current crop of working tax payers pay for your living allowances ?

Means testing is the only way to do it.

Edited by dannyh (05 Oct 2015 1.56pm)

I think if you've worked for 40 years, and paid tax and national insurance you're entitled to a state pension, access to old age care etc because that's what you paid in for. I don't think you deserve a castle or anything special, but the way the current situation is developing, we have a generation growing up that actual seem overly entitled to demand that others receive nothing.

Everyone is entitled to the basics. If I paid in NIC I've actually bought my state pension, but then successive governments seem to be hell bent on making sure they meet as few responsibilities to society as possible, and farming as much of it out to private enterprise as possible to milk.

Also a lot of people are still working as pensioners to make ends meet now days, which kind of suggests that something is going a bit wrong. Realistically, I think you should be able to live out your last few years when you retire. I'd like to see means testing not as a method for making sure pensioners and people over the state age of retirement aren't s**ting themselves about the cost of buying food or putting on the heating.

I think if you've worked for 40 years, and paid tax and national insurance you're entitled to a state pension, access to old age care etc because that's what you paid in for. I don't think you deserve a castle or anything special, but the way the current situation is developing, we have a generation growing up that actual seem overly entitled to demand that others receive nothing.

Everyone is entitled to the basics. If I paid in NIC I've actually bought my state pension, but then successive governments seem to be hell bent on making sure they meet as few responsibilities to society as possible, and farming as much of it out to private enterprise as possible to milk.

Also a lot of people are still working as pensioners to make ends meet now days, which kind of suggests that something is going a bit wrong. Realistically, I think you should be able to live out your last few years when you retire. I'd like to see means testing not as a method for making sure pensioners and people over the state age of retirement aren't s**ting themselves about the cost of buying food or putting on the heating.

This is the point Jamie. Your 'last few years' are now likely to be when you are past 100. Shouldn't you have to work until you are genuinely less able? I see so many people that retired before they were 60, let alone 65. You really think they paid enough to cover them for the next 40 years? Their contributions in 40 years of work were enough to cover their next 40 years?

At what point have you really 'bought' your State pension and how long should it last you. Fair enough, if you retire at 60 maybe your State pension should cease when you are 80?

Great, I like to entertain

Clearly it's not viable and whoosh on you for thinking I meant it. My point is, however, that you should only take out what you put in, otherwise you are stealing from the next generation. If you choose to start taking your pension early when you are still able to work then you should get less. In theory things do work that way but in practice we have a generation that lucked out and - if this site is anything to go by - doesn't care.

It seems I am not the only one that thinks this is a selfish approach. This from today's Evening Standard:

The contract with the generation below used to be something along the lines of: hang on in there and in a quarter of a century you will be us. You’ll have the jobs, the houses, the savings. You’ll have the security and the faint, comfortable dullness of middle age: your world will be our world. In fact, for very many years over the past couple of centuries, that promise was a bare minimum: your world, we could say with confidence, will be better than ours. You will be freer, more prosperous, more mobile, healthier and better housed.

That contract has been broken; and its breaking is of unimaginable importance. But you don’t hear that much about it, because under-30s are barely represented in the national conversation. They are not, yet, MPs, and they don’t set the agenda in the media. Inasmuch as they are glimpsed, it’s through the prism of their parents’ anxieties: “boomerang children” refusing to leave the nest, “politically disengaged” moochers incessantly sexting each-other, “generation rent”.

What do we say to them now? “Sorry” might be a start. In a quarter of a century we will need to admit to our children: you will not be us. We have pulled that ladder up. We have spent all the money and left our bar tab for you to pay off. You will have little or no prospect of owning a home. Your chances of being secure in a job are slim. And on top of the no-home, no-security, no-money thing, the chances are that even before you finish education you will be very sad, or very anxious, or very afraid.