The Conservative Party

I'm With Stupid said:
I get that's how it's sold to everyone. And no-one is saying that it shouldn't work like that. But the reality is that when you say you "pay in," that suggests some sort of investment that it saved for your retirement. In reality, National Insurance is just another tax that is immediately spent, and you are then promised a cut of future taxpayer's tax payments to pay for your retirement. Effectively, there is no relation between what you paid in and what you get out. Your contributions paid for your parents'/grandparents' pensions, and my contributions will pay for yours.

And that's fine, as long as the unofficial contract between the generations holds up. It's not fine when the state pension (as modest as it is) is ring fenced while working people's wages are stagnating, and nurses, train workers, teachers, etc, are told they can't get a pay rise to match inflation. If for no other reason than the practical reality, which is that if working people aren't paying enough taxes, there'll be no money to pay for your pension anyway.

Obviously, I'm very aware that it risks turning into this battle where generations turn against each other, rather than turning against the people who got us into this mess. But I think it's important that pensioners face up to the economic reality of how their pension is paid, and if you keep voting for (not all, but in higher numbers than any other age group) isolationist, tax-avoiding politicians that fuck up the economy, there won't be enough money to 'pay out' your pension no matter how much you 'paid in.'

The other option, of course, is to switch to an entirely individual model, where your National Insurance contributions go directly into a government-operated savings account, are invested on your behalf and can't be touched by anyone until your retire. Then you really will get out what you put in. But it'll take 50 years to transition to something like that, and in the meantime, we've still got to pay for pensioners somehow.
Click to expand...
There is a relation between what you pay and what you get out.
10 years full NI for any state pension at all and 35 years for a full,one.
Every full years NI paid in gets you 1/35th of the full state pension.
 
Mon Autre said:
Man on the internet debunks the claims of a specialist charity because what they're saying simply doesn't sound right to him. Try being more curious before you just shut someone down.

I haven't seen that statistics myself but it's not hard to see how the economic costs associated with a suicide could spiral. The involvement of the emergency services, a coroner, loved ones taking time off work to grieve etc. The lost economic output/potential of the person who has died.
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Well it breaks down like this:

Cost of actual death (emergency services, coroner, and family costs) are ~£8.5k

The other £1.446m Is made up of loss of earnings/productivity and something they call “intangible costs”. These intangible costs are made up of something the government calls the value of quality of life - which they place at £70k per year per person for a healthy life. The Samaritans are taking this £70k x number of years you’d have lived, they then deduct the productivity so as not to double count. They also then add in what you might have spent on shit plus productivity lost by your family as they grieve etc.

The quality of life metric isn’t particularly meaningful in this context IMHO and accounts for half the amount quoted.
 
denislawsbackheel said:
There is a relation between what you pay and what you get out.
10 years full NI for any state pension at all and 35 years for a full,one.
Every full years NI paid in gets you 1/35th of the full state pension.
Click to expand...
Someone on JSA for 35 years will have 35 years stamp on their NINO.
There used to be (possibly still are) people who sign on for contributions only, meaning that they don't get any payment (now), but they still get their national insurance contributions marked up.
(Iirc this tends to be one member of a married couple when the partner earns over the couple's allowance rate)
 
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