If retirees are going to hate the government anyway, and they love national service, then why doesn't the government just create a national service for retirees? And maybe retirees can be taxed like working people too?
The main argument against national service for the young is they need to be out studying, starting families and getting bad haircuts, but retirees only do two of those things and they always complain about being bored, lonely and fall down internet rabbit holes into political extremism. We could send them out litter picking, taking down lamppost flags and catching disability claimants.
>>103067 What the fuck are they smoking? Haven't the retired already earned their way in society? A life fo fucking graft and now they want to conscript them to the fogie scouts? Yeah one of you mentioned how In Ukrain it's become a careful oldmans war, but fuck these are our elders. How disrespectful to even consider them elegible for conscription. Invited, sure, but national service?
Well they do seem to have the delusion that they're the generation that fought both world wars, they should love it. They could march them down the street and we'd all come out to bang pots and pans too. Blitz spirit.
>>103068 >Haven't the retired already earned their way in society?
No? And they have infinite free time and a subsidy that is slowly bankrupting society. Only those too old to be fit for any community service will have done national service and the majority of the elderly voted for it at the last election for the young thereby signalling their own expectation that people owe something to society.
>How disrespectful to even consider them elegible for conscription
Sounds like you've had one too many Werther's Originals, grandad. Maybe an afternoon working at the food bank will build some character.
>Haven't the retired already earned their way in society?
No. They didn't pay enough taxes to cover the services that they used during their working life, let alone cover the cost of their triple-locked state pension. They've saddled us with debt to pay for the generous public services during their prime years, they saddled us with debt to protect them from COVID and they're saddling us with even more debt every time they get their pension. They're the worst scroungers of all.
Next time you see a pensioner, reflect on the fact that someone born in 2100 will still be paying off the debts of that generation, if Britain still exists by then.
>No? And they have infinite free time and a subsidy that is slowly bankrupting society.
Have you ever met an elderly person? There's loads of them who have worked 45 to 50 years, a lot of them quite exhausting and difficult jobs and careers, and to be very honest, they deserve being left alone in their old age and being able to spend their golden years doing whatever they want, and essentially being paid for it. They also spent decades paying into the system, so why shouldn't they reap the benefit of having done their part.
Your words could come back to haunt you one day when you are that age, younglad. Have a word.
None of us are going to get fuck all but what we've savedd ourselves. The only way the system is fair is if every subsequent generation gets it, in which case your argument holds water; but that's the exact problem. It's a big pyramid scheme and we're the ones who are going to be holding the ball when the music stops.
>>103075 >they deserve being left alone in their old age and being able to spend their golden years doing whatever they want, and essentially being paid for it.
Why? They've not paid their way into a triple-lock pension system and they virulently push back against any attempt to lighten the load on the rest of society that they're bankrupting.
>Your words could come back to haunt you one day when you are that age, younglad. Have a word.
Oh no, not a couple years of volunteering in the community. Who will sit in my massive house, why can't this be a young man's problem?
You seem a rather angry young man. Perhaps you should get that sorted out before you direct your anger at whoever you think is responsible for your own misery.
Oh, here, have a Werther's. No, take a whole handful. There.
All age-related resentments could be resolved equitably with this one weird trick: big taxes on landlordism and on large private pensions, including charging NI on pension income.
Unlike scrapping winter fuel payments, the triple lock, free bus passes, outright conscription, or any other nonsense, there's no risk of this unfairly impacting poor pensioners - and there's a lot of those. As it stands, rich pensioners are treated better than workers by the tax system, and poor pensioners are treated about the same. That's deranged.
The only real risk to such a move is that it discourages voluntary saving in the future, but we're already in a situation where that's unattractive thanks to constant talk of increasing the retirement age or the climate collapsing, plus stagnant working-age incomes.
>The only real risk to such a move is that it discourages voluntary saving in the future, but we're already in a situation where that's unattractive thanks to constant talk of increasing the retirement age or the climate collapsing, plus stagnant working-age incomes.
So then increase working-age incomes. Pay people a decent wage or salary for their work. The problem isn't that employers don't make money, it's that too much of it goes to owners and shareholders.
>>103083 The government tried that, and the many thousands of employers in the hospitality industry were quick to point out that many of them are not making very much at all. A few giant corporations make all the money, and we need to find a way to take the money off them without taking money off pub landlords and cafes. And that is either much harder than it looks, or it's exactly as easy as it looks but MPs mysteriously keep missing the votes to do it because they're all on the golf course with the CEOs of those companies.
Retirees do pay tax like working people, communistlad. Any income above £12 570 is classed as taxable, just the same as working people. So for example if you take the state pension and use a private pension to give yourself a retirement income of 25K a year, half of that amount is tax deductable. Even with state pension increases pensioners end up paying more tax due to fiscal drag. The tax threshold should be around 18K now. Maybe have a moan about that rather than being leeched by the state.
>>103086 If you're employed you pay NI, if you're a landlord or a pensioner you don't. Indeed, you don't pay any NI above retirement age even if you're still in work.
This makes sense if you pretend NI is still an insurance scheme like it's 1906, but it's nonsense in the real world where NI is just a gimmicky form of income tax with a series of arbitrary cutouts and a randomly selected cutoff point at which it becomes a regressive tax for no real reason.
There is no good economic justification for doing things the way we currently do them.
