Gengulphus wrote:what is actually going on is misrepresentation of facts by governments (of all political stripes) over many years.
The misrepresentation is believing that the government is ever short of money and has no capacity to pay. That is never an issue in the UK and never has been. As we see every time there is a crisis.
The whole of the monetary system is essentially an illusion. Overall nobody can be permitted to save or you end up with other people short of income. Trying to maintain that illusion via offsets and shuffling is what causes all the fun.
In reality you can no more save for a pension than you can put on a jumper in August to save heat for January. It's a classic fallacy of composition.
Pensions are always a current production issue. How much of the bread, etc. that the nation procures is to be reserved for those who are not involved in its procurement? Therefore there is always going to be a mechanism by which those doing the procuring cannot be permitted to purchase all they have procured. The mechanisms we have now are NICs and compulsory pension payments. Both of which are taxes on those at the "bread consumption" level of society. Trying to tax anything else wouldn't release the necessary bread.
All taxes do is stop you buying certain things. The numbers deleted just go in the bin.
What we have seen throughout the Corona pandemic is that we can provision the shops with everything everybody needs with rather a lot of the population stood idle. What that tells us is that a large fraction of the population is engaged in what is essentially pointless activity that does nothing other than move numbers around bank accounts. Little, if any, of it is actually required.
Therefore they could all be retired permanently and things would carry on much as they are now. The political question is whether the remaining people doing the actual necessary work and using up a full week of their time doing so will stand for that.
And that's the pension argument in a nutshell. How much can you ask the younger population to produce that they are denied the ability to consume, so that older people can consume them, without the younger population deciding that is no longer a fair deal.
There's only so far the "look at the capital inheritance we have handed down to you, and don't worry you'll get your pension too in time" argument goes when the young can't buy houses, don't have good jobs to look forward to, the roads are rubbish and the pension age keeps receding into the distance.