Centre For Social Justice: Work Them Until They Drop

A policy proposal by a prominent UK think tank would have the pension age going up to 75 in 16 years.

A report out today by the Centre for Social Justice says Britain can no longer afford the current plan to raise the pension age to 67 in 2028 then 68 by 2046, so it must be speeded up. The pensions bill has ballooned from £17billion in 1989 to £92billion now, making up £4 of every £10 of welfare spending, the report adds. By 2023 it will cost £20billion more as the population ages and the birthrate falls.

That's strange, since the government said, decades ago, that immigration would help fix the looming pension crisis.

Government reports and press releases trumpeted the miraculous economic benefits of immigration: high levels of immigration would boost prosperity very significantly by increasing Britain's gross domestic product (the measure of how much the country produces every year); it would ensure an end to labour and skills shortages; it would enable the NHS and other public services to grow at a faster rate by using cheaper immigrant labour; and it would help Britain to avoid the "pensions time-bomb" created by an ageing population by adding a whole new tier of youthful and energetic workers.

Since Europe opened the flood gates to immigrants in 2015, everything should be peachy, right?

Welfare campaigners are appalled by the report and point out that with workplace pensions often unaffordable, three-quarters of Britain’s elderly will rely entirely on their state payments by 2036.

If current trends continue, and the new policy proposal is enacted, then in 16 years three-fourths of Britains will be working until about the time they become great-grandparents. Don't worry though, the people in charge think it's great.

“Working longer potentially improves health and wellbeing– we don’t do enough to help older people stay in work. The state pension doesn’t reflect healthy working life expectancy.”

Yes, as it turns out, working through your golden years to earn income to help prop up the failing social welfare program - which was also used as an excuse to flood the nation with so many foreigners that the major cities are no longer majority British - is good for your health! So holistic, too.

And from the Department for Work and Pensions,

"We’re creating opportunities for people of all generations with record employment.”

In Britain, the average life expectancy is 79 for men and 83 for women. Assuming a standard deviation of 15 years (the number given for US statistics), 42% of men and 32% of women will never collect a cent of their pensions. (The percentages would improve somewhat if we computed the conditional probabilities to exclude those who don't make it to their tax-paying years.) It's curious that social justice warriors have not adopted the cause of finding the systemic bias causing disparate outcomes for men and women, given that all genders are equal. Overall, men pay much more into the tax system over the course of their lives, and receive much less in return for it.

Others have computed that even pushing the retirement age to 75 does not push the needle into solvency, and it would have to be 79. The government, of course, would hesitate to propose a pension policy where retirement age is high that the average life expectancy of the group that pays the most taxes. I predict even the 75-year cutoff will never go into effect, as their pension program will collapse before 2036.