New Report - State Pension To Be Paid Hours Before Death

The situation on State Pensions is getting so farcical that it may well be that we may only be eligible to draw one hours before our death rather than at a specific age.

We laugh? No. On the one hand we will be more aggressively screened via our DNA by insurance firms to find more reasons why we cannot have life insurance or critical illness cover as they will see from our genes whether we are potentially likely to have diseases of some kind at some point in our lives, and the other the State has strategically accrued for our retirements so badly that the pot will not cover a pension for us until we are a few hours before expiration.

Lord Adair Turner (oh no not him again - the serial report writer and FSA failure? Yes it is he!), wrote a report a while back which has been avidly grabbed by a clueless Government to get into law that the retirement age will be raised to 68 shortly. Now, the UK pension's regulator, David Norgrove, reckons that could be raised to 70.

I mean, come on. We pay astronomic amounts of tax and National Insurance - the employer pays a whack of National Insurance for each employee too and still we have no money? And let's be realistic, in an era of non-ageist political correctness, is it wise to believe that people should stay in employment that long, particularly as young people have been hardest hit in the current sharp rise in unemployment? What prospects for the future for our young?

The writing is on the wall. The bank of ideas are empty. We are going to have to work like domestic animals to our dying days because the state isn't going to provide for us despite the vast money we pay into the tax pot. Makes you wonder what on earth all that money has been spent on.

Bureaucracy springs to mind - about 1 in 4 UK jobs are in the Public sector thanks to the rise in layers of administration by this Government. Two major wars would be another. Massive, unchecked spending in Government departments like the MoD and NHS where we see little return for our tax pounds while we already know how much just keeping Politicians in the life they so richly deserve costs.

If you are in any Public Sector job then you excluded from the above shock figures, of course. Such employees are the chosen ones where the Government has granted them superannuated, index linked pensions - based on final salaries - the sort that the private sector can't afford. As the Government has not accounted or accrued for such lavish pensions, of course, it will be our fresh tax money that goes to pay for it. And it is rising as bureaucracy rises, the layers of Government rise and the cost of paying for them rises too.

But hang on. We have also 'agreed' to bail out the banks. Because of the extra burden on the State for doing so, underwritten by our tax money, the available money to be spent on Public Services is going to have to decrease - massively - in the next 20 years in order to pay for the failed gambles of the boys in the financial world who are now gearing up to pay themselves £billions in bonuses for conning us all that they should be allowed to do it all over again.

So the available money for pensions is actually decreasing and the current estimates of idiots like Lord Turner, who has so many jobs he won't have to worry about his retirement as he will be on boards and quangos probably long after his death and he probably already has difficulty remembering which one he should be turning up to each day, are already defunct even before they have cleverly press released them.

We did a really good thing in bailing out banks. All that money has gone down the financial drain and has done us not a jot of good, but has made us all far worse off. Clever.

Some 20+% of our remuneration between us and our employers goes into National Insurance every single year of our working life, I am not even thinking about PAYE tax here. Surely, there is more than enough to provide more than a pittance of a pension for a person in retirement here and chip in for the vast dole queues out of that?

But I can't add up like Lord Turner or Darling or Brown. They are the masters when it comes to the economy. Leave it to them and we will all be ok. Just hang onto your job as long as you can turn up to work or are alive, whichever comes first. I am even looking into legally bequeathing my job to a relative or keeping it after my death as there may be no money in the pot in the hereafter due to bail outs in the afterlife - I will let you know how I get on.