NoKlearDirekshon

@JChimirie66677 @miriam_cates Yes and a large chunk (tho not all) of minimum wage earners will be inexperienced youngsters starting out in life (it’s where most of us started if we’re honest). Many will still live at home, with minimal overheads. As they gain experience their earning power should increase.

Miriam, the figures are largely accurate and the question is a legitimate one. But the framing has some significant gaps worth examining. The comparison between the poorest pensioner and a minimum wage worker is the most revealing one in your post, and not quite in the way you intend. You are right that their incomes are broadly similar. But the minimum wage worker is building toward something. National Insurance contributions, potential occupational pension, career progression, asset accumulation. The pensioner with no savings, no private pension and relying entirely on state support has arrived at the end of that journey with nothing to show for it but the state pension and the means tested benefits that supplement it. That is not a comfortable place to be. Comparing the destination to the journey without acknowledging that distinction is misleading. On the one in four pensioner millionaires. The overwhelming majority of those millionaires are people who bought modest houses in the 1970s and 1980s that have since appreciated through no particular effort of their own. They are asset rich and income poor. They cannot eat their house. Means testing on the basis of property values would penalise people for living in areas where prices rose while doing nothing to address genuine wealth held in liquid assets and investment portfolios. If means testing is the answer the mechanism matters enormously and the property millionaire framing papers over that complexity rather than addressing it. On the triple lock. Agreed it needs reform and you are right that pension spending at half the social security budget is not sustainable indefinitely. But there is a conversation worth having before we get to reform. The National Insurance fund was raided by successive governments and spent as general revenue rather than ring fenced as the contributory scheme it was sold as. The people now receiving the state pension paid in on an explicit promise. The fiscal pressure you are describing is not the result of their greed or their longevity. It is the result of decades of political mismanagement that is now being presented as a demographic problem requiring the contributors to accept less than they were promised. The urgency to cut government spending is real. But pension reform that does not first acknowledge that mismanagement and hold it accountable risks punishing the victims of the system's failure rather than addressing its causes. That is not a reform. It is a renegotiation conducted entirely on the state's terms after the other party has already performed their obligations in full. One final point. The benefits you list, free travel, free prescriptions, winter fuel, senior discounts, exist because older people face specific costs that working age adults do not. Mobility limitations, higher healthcare needs, fixed incomes that cannot absorb inflation in the way that working incomes can. Presenting them as privileges rather than targeted support for a group with specific vulnerabilities is a framing choice that does a lot of work in your argument. It deserves to be named as such.

Is the state pension really so 'meagre'? Let's take a look... The basic state pension is just £12,547 a year. But... Only around 15% of pensioners rely on the state pension alone. The vast majority have other income from private pensions etc., which is exactly how our system is designed to work (and why the UK has generous tax breaks for pension contributions). The small proportion of pensioners whose only source of income is the state pension are entitled to other benefits in addition, including pension credit, housing benefit and council tax support. A pensioner with no other income, no savings, no disabilities, no care responsibilities and rent of £800 per month is entitled to £401.55 a week in benefits including state pension, which is £20,881 a year. For comparison, a full time minimum wage worker has an after tax income of £21,364. Unlike a pensioner, a full time minimum wage worker is not entitled to free travel, free prescriptions, a winter fuel payment or senior citizens discounts. £21,000 a year is not a lot of money. But the very poorest pensioners have similar incomes to low-wage workers. Given the greater costs faced by those who are working, it's perhaps not surprising that working age adults are now more likely to live in poverty than pensioners. And at the other end of the scale, one in four pensioners are millionaires and still receive the basic state pension, paid for by current tax payers (including those on minimum wage). No one (definitely not me) is suggesting that the state pension should be reduced for the poorest pensioners. But pension spending now accounts for half of the UK's social security budget and, given the urgent need to cut government spending, we must consider reforms like means-testing and scrapping the triple lock.

@miriam_cates @alfamito155 You forget that a large chunk of minimum wage earners will be inexperienced youngsters starting out in life (it’s where most of us started if we’re honest). Many will still live at home, with minimal overheads. (Not all before I get jumped on! But a significant percentage)

@Alwaysaslave27 @dazzleplayzz @Simmons__ It goes both ways. And the problem now is that ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING is so expensive. In an ideal world workers would be able to afford the normal price and therefore wouldn’t begrudge the discounts provided for benefit claimants, however that’s not the reality.

@dazzleplayzz @Simmons__ Try living with a serious illness and having people tell you dont deserve a day out at all.

Is this fair?

@TheRealJamieKay I don’t know a single person who wasn’t disgusted by the Jimmy Saville, Epstein or Catholic Church scandals. ALL are abhorrent. The one big difference with the grooming gangs is the race element, by that I mean the racist targeting of young white girls by mainly Pakistani men.

Funny how the same people waving flags over “grooming gang cover-ups” go very quiet when it comes to Jimmy Savile - a decades-long scandal ignored by institutions they never seem keen to challenge. Outrage isn’t the issue. Selective outrage is.

One of the hardest conversations to have in this country is about pensions and welfare spending. It’s because the moment you raise them, people assume you’re attacking pensioners or the vulnerable. So let me be clear before I go any further. This isn’t an argument against supporting people who need it. It’s a question about whether the system that provides that support can survive in its current form. Because if it can’t, the people who depend on it the most are the ones who get hurt first. That’s why this conversation matters. Now the numbers… The government raises roughly £1.2 trillion a year in total receipts. Here’s where it comes from. £329 billion from income tax. £200 billion from National Insurance. £214 billion from VAT. £105 billion from corporation tax. £50 billion from council tax. Plus fuel duty, stamp duty, alcohol and tobacco duties, inheritance tax, capital gains tax, and everything else. The welfare bill is £333 billion. Every penny raised from income tax, the single largest source of government revenue, doesn’t cover it. The welfare bill is larger than income tax receipts. Combine income tax and National Insurance and you get roughly £529 billion. Welfare takes £333 billion of that. Debt interest takes another £114 billion. That’s £447 billion gone before a single pound goes to the NHS, schools, police, defence, roads, or anything else. Those two items alone consume 85% of everything raised through income tax and NI combined. Everything else the government does has to be funded from VAT, corporation tax, council tax, and every other levy. And here’s the thing people don’t always connect. You pay those too. VAT is 20% on almost everything you buy. Employer National Insurance, just raised to 15%, gets passed on through higher prices and lower wages. Corporation tax gets passed on through the cost of goods and services. Council tax comes straight out of your household budget. Fuel duty, insurance premium tax, alcohol duty, tobacco duty. It all comes back to you. The tax burden is at its highest level since the 1940s. Income tax thresholds have been frozen since 2021, dragging millions more people into higher tax brackets without anyone voting for a tax rise. There are now 39 million income tax payers, up from 33 million just four years ago. Six million more people paying income tax. And it’s still not enough. Welfare spending rose by £18 billion this year alone. The two biggest drivers are the triple lock on pensions, which has added £21 billion since 2019, and disability and incapacity benefits, which have added £24 billion in the same period. Both rising faster than the economy that funds them. The two-child benefit cap was just lifted at a cost of £3 billion a year. Whether you think that’s the right call or not, it’s another £3 billion added to a bill that already exceeds total income tax receipts. And that’s the pattern. Every individual spending commitment has a justification. The total is unsustainable. And anyone who tries to talk about the total gets dragged into an argument about the individual line items. None of this is an argument for pulling support from people who need it. It’s an argument for being honest about whether the current system can continue to provide it. Because right now, it can’t. Everyone who’s looked at the numbers honestly knows it can’t. The OBR knows it. The IFS knows it. The Treasury knows it. The cruellest thing we can do is pretend it’s all fine and let people plan their lives around promises that won’t be kept. The woman relying on her state pension at 67. The carer who needs the system to be there. The disabled person who depends on support that’s already under political pressure. They deserve honesty more than anyone. But we can’t get to honesty because the conversation gets shut down before it starts. And the people who benefit most from that silence aren’t the vulnerable. It’s the politicians who’d rather nobody looked at the numbers too closely.

With respect, the people saying they paid in for thirty five years and are entitled to the result are not muddying the debate. They are describing their lived experience of a system that was explicitly sold to them as contributory. You can check your National Insurance record online, see exactly how many qualifying years you have and be told precisely what state pension you will receive as a result. That is not a misunderstanding of the system. That is the system working exactly as it was designed and communicated. Telling people that their understanding of what they paid into is wrong because the legislative definition says otherwise is not clarifying the debate. It is asking them to accept a framing that undermines their legitimate expectation in order to make the political argument tidier. On the triple lock. Agreed it needs reform and indexing to inflation is a reasonable starting point for that conversation. But that argument is considerably stronger when it is made without first telling contributors that their sense of entitlement is a lunatic position. They are entitled. The letter from HMRC confirming their qualifying years and projected pension says so. The debate about affordability and reform does not require us to pretend otherwise.

@ImtiazMadmood Compassionate capitalism. Unfortunately some will get left behind but as long as opportunities are offered then the State has done its bit. If people refuse to help themselves there should be no state safety net. Socialism crushes ambition and work ethic in favour of fairness.

@ImtiazMadmood If those at the bottom continue to put no effort in year on year then there needs to be consequences. Help should be offered but not unconditionally. It needs to be clear that effort is required for doing well in life. Making an effort needs to be considered the cool, smart way.

Why Socialism Doesn't Work, Explained for a 10-Year-Old. You're in a class of 30 students. One kid works like crazy and gets an 18 average. Another does nothing and gets a 4. The teacher decides it's unfair and gives everyone the class average: 11. The one who had 18 stops working. Why bother if it changes nothing? The one who had 4 keeps doing nothing. Why work if you're handed 11 for free? The next year the class average is 7. Then 5. Then 3. The teacher doesn't get it. He thinks the problem is that the students aren't supportive enough of each other. So he starts punishing those who don't put in enough effort. He monitors everyone. He decides who studies what. He bans switching classes. That's exactly what happened. Every time. In every country. No exceptions. USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Cambodia, Ethiopia, East Germany. 40 attempts. Same result. Every time. Socialism punishes those who produce and rewards those who don't. Everyone ends up producing nothing. And when no one's producing anymore, the government uses force to make people work. It's not an accident. It's the design. - @BrivaelFr

Yes I am saying that - they are both capable of working. They know how to play the system, they are experts at it. I’ve offered to employ them, so has my husband as we are both self employed and at times needed help - they always say as long as it’s cash in hand - we always say No and we are not going to enable you. Our system is to lax - we keep giving without asking what it’s funding and without measuring the return on investment. For PIP, why do we just hand out money for every ailment - how does that solve depression and anxiety, why don’t we give vouchers for talking therapies etc? For incontinence why don’t we hand out incontinence pads and washing tablets - not every ailment needs a cash injection - we make it to easy and enable the system to be played. The system needs a radical overhaul - this will ensure the people who genuinely need PIP continue to receive it and those who need aids to get back into being self sufficient also get help, with the added bonus of removing those that are playing the system.

@annaroseridgway @LaneyGH @lisakeb007 Oh I think the taxpayer funds a lot of people in London. Are you saying everyone on benefits should move out of London?

@LaneyGH @lisakeb007 If you can't afford to live in London without the taxpayer paying your bills, don't live in London.

25% of pensioners are millionaires. 55% of welfare spending goes on pensioners. Why don’t we: 1) means test the state pension, millionaires don’t need benefits. 2) increase the amount we give to the pensioners who need it the most. 3) stop the unsustainable triple lock.

@Kent___Dorfman @chatswithem If they applied it for the super rich then yes but the problem is they would attack the middle income / middle wealth again. Those that have worked really hard, with no support, for a comfortable retirement would find themselves only just able to get by after all that effort.

@Kent___Dorfman @chatswithem Where would you set the parameters for means testing? Interested to know because in my experience for anything means tested they set the bar too low and then freeze thresholds for years meaning year on year more people lose out. Would it be on assets or income or both?

Hearing opinions that elderly with houses that are near a million pounds should be made to sell , and why should they have state pensions etc I find this really unpalatable I have someone in my family with a home that's not a million but would be deemed an expensive home by many But it's been in her family for generations She's worked all her life and never taken a penny from the state She's mid 70s She's just over the state pension - by a few grand . Which she's taxed on. So lives on circa 14k She just about manages . No cleaner. No updated carpets. Etc And she's earned her state pension. Why should she be forced to sell? Her home is very old and has increased in value. And it's her home . We live in a society where everything is so expensive . Where more is given to those that don't And people are envious of those with something to show Our culture is so Topsy turvy Success should be celebrated Hard work should be celebrated And our elderly respected And people should live within their means and only have kids they can afford And if we don't let millions of people into the U.K., we wouldn't have a housing shortage And if we didn't have a welfare state that was so absurd And had a Gov that was responsible in managing the county's finances And used our resources properly There'd be plenty of money to go around

@Kent___Dorfman @chatswithem The problem is that our welfare bill is enormous now, and technically the State Pension is not a benefit. You could offer those who don’t need it the chance to forgo it in exchange for a reduction in IHT rate, which might help. However they have earned the right to it.

@g_gosden Even if this chart were true, it’s irrelevant. You don’t have to have a degree to vote. Plus academic education and intelligence are two separate things. You don’t need to read Shakespeare, speak multiple languages or be able to do long division to know what’s right and wrong.

Well that’s pretty clear cut

@damekatydenise_ Paneer leaking welly

This lady’s name is your favourite India food followed by something you’d find in a pond. There will be a prize for the best suggestion! #NameThatTroon

@riversorare @miriam_cates Yes and it’s currently around half the minimum wage. Which is also strangling the economy as other wage growth is not keeping up and employers can’t afford to pay it for inexperienced people.

Thats because they contributed to it. They are entitled to it. Who knows what the rest of their retirement planning looks like - thats up to them. But everyone will have assumed they were starting with the basic state pension. Now what shouldn't happened is that the government shouldn't allow it to grow to a level that isn't sustainable and if the Triple Lock continues then you will eventually get to that point. People were promised a very basic state pension as a starting. Not a Triple Locked one you can live on on its own. So at some point soon the Triple Lock will need to shift to an RPI Lock. But we need to be clear to people. It is not intended to be sufficient to live on. If you dont make any other provision for your old age you will have to carry on working, move in with family or be poor. Just as was the case throughout human history. It is this idiotic attempt to ensure that nobody is poor no matter how bad their life choices that is causing the problem here.

By 2027, there will be 3million pensioners who pay higher or additional rate tax. These people, by definition, are in the top 20% of all UK earners. Yet they will still receive a £12K a year state pension, in a direct transfer of cash from the poorer young to the wealthier old.

@miriam_cates Perhaps they could be incentivized to forgo it in return for lower IHT rate but they have earned it and have the right to receive it.

@miriam_cates Yes and that 20% have paid, by definition, much more into the system over the years. For the 2024/25 tax year, the top 10% of earners alone contribute approximately 59%–60% of all income tax. They deserve the State Pension.

@riversorare @dave43law Means testing never takes someone’s full circumstances into account. You might look wealthy on paper - doesn’t mean you have spare income. You will have higher overheads, pay more for bills etc. The problem is that whenever they means test they set the barrier too low.

It must not be means tested. Everyone has been told they were contributing to it. Im 50 and it's a fundamental part of my retirement planning. The Triple Lock was a stupid idea I agree - they should now keep the pension at roughly the level it is now in real terms with an RPI link. If need be welfare and other needs based spending needs to be cut (FFS the Winter Fuel Allowance had to go) and some people will need to be poor again. But you cannot take away the one thing everyone has contributed to relied upon and is entitled to. We may instead need wealth taxes or enhanced rates on passive incomes. Which may have similar effects, but will capture more from the wealthy. But means testing the state pension is just going to continue the policy of screwing over honest workers in the middle and slightly upper earnings levels to pay for the poor. There is a clear conspiracy between poor and rich to fuck over everyone in the middle. And this is a continuation of it. No.

The time has come for 'state pension' to be means tested Removal of those 3 million from the equation at the very least would free £36billion to fund others