I’m reading these numbers and thinking to myself, that seems like a crazy small number of people for a country with the population of the UK and an average pension of just under £52,000 doesn’t seem particularly extreme for what I’m assuming are the top earners in the country’s council system.
In Canada, I’m sure that we’d have tons of municipal making more than $130k a year who could expect to retire with a similar size pension. Lawyers, engineers, managers, directors, police officers, fire fighters, etc. etc.
ETA: 7800 out of over 2 million pension pay outs, we’re talking about the top less than 0.4% of pension earners.
Those numbers are rage bait in UK were the average salary is 27k and the country has a cost of living crisis. The authors achieved their goal by triggering a lot of people.
Without an analysis it’s not clear if the schemes are generous, they had a poor run of investment experience or they did the old thing of making contributions in the scheme haphazardly. A lot of these councils are circling the drain.
Most of the councils have the actuarial reports and the funding strategy statement on their websites IIRC.
I figured they were when I realized they’re bitching about the top less than 0.4% of pension recipients.
I’m a public servant and am used to my salary and pension being used as rage bait. Our pension program is routinely described as unaffordable and yet the government keeps on grabbing back money because the program’s surplus has gotten higher than allowed. Some of my colleagues complain about it, feeling it’s unfair and we should get a break on our contributions. I figure it’s fair enough as the government would have to fork out extra if it was in deficit. Though I question the wisdom of taking the excess surplus as it seems to me, you’d want to leave it in to try and avoid having to top up a deficit later on when the markets are struggling.
The issue now is that they cannot afford to keep paying into the schemes when the council is basically broke because of:
Huge rise in statutory social care costs (eats up 60-70% of all council spending)
Huge rise in SEND (children) spending
They have cut basic services (like garbage collection) to the absolute bone in many areas of the country (collected every 3 weeks now) but something clearly has to give because they are also not increasing council tax enough to compensate (by law they can only increase it by 4.99%/year without a referendum)
So when you add all of this up, about 1 in 4 local authorities in the UK are approaching bankruptcy (Section 114 in the UK)
There is simply no money available to plug in that gap and every politician is burying their head in the sand about the issue, which at this point is critical.
Yes. I think we briefly covered that in the US /Canada thread.
In many ways, its the standard way of dealing with retirement benefits that are too generous over one generation.
You dilute the benefits of the new entrants, and you set up a transition period and grandfathered rights for the older scheme participants.
That seems to have worked for Canada, but its failing in the UK primarily due its unbalanced tax structure.
This FT excerpt aligns with my thoughts on the gigantic mess that the UK has gotten itself into, and why trying to solve the problem is analogous to banging your head against the wall repeatedly to no avail.
I went to an interesting seminar last year that included a country by country comparison of the funded status of their public pension plans. Canada had by far the best funded ratios and the UK was the worst. US was also poor but not as bad as UK. Will try to find the chart when I return from holidays.
Biden won a majority of the popular vote in 2020 (in three elections Trump has never had the majority) so change is possible. That said, only for a small portion of Trump voters.
I suspect there are folks who voted Trump-Biden-Trump in an anti-incumbent sentiment. They don’t like the status quo so vote the status quo out.
I honestly don’t see him heading the ticket in 2028.
I could maybe see him being the VPOTUS candidate, which is plausibly allowed, and then assuming power similar to Putin’s end run around term limits in Russia.
But then HE won’t be the one getting the votes.
Obviously the amendment to allow a third term isn’t going anywhere.
