-
A person on the average UK salary could expect to pay £150,000 of national insurance between the age of 20 and 60. Not forgetting that employers pay similar into the pot. £300,000 per average earner...shouldn't that be enough?
The problem is that all of this works on a PAYG system. There is no setting aside of your contributions. This works fine when you have a growing population and growth - more new entrants to the job market mean that the tax burden is spread amongst more people. The post WWII baby boom means that as the birth rate has shrunk, there are fewer people in the work force propping up the large elderly population. So the tax burden cannot be spread so thin, and they are all living longer so that adds to the longer term costs.
This is not news. This has been a known thing for 40 years and little has been done to mitigate it.
Horse. Bolt. Barn door.
Any solution sounds terrible and heartless. Although NI contributions paid out of retirement incomes would go some way to plugging that gap. I am sure that there are more clever solutions out there.
Aroogah-
There is another option,
State owned assets of natural monopolies, earning a steady but non-economically unsettling return, held in a Sovereign wealth fund.
Examples would be the National (electricity) Grid, Gas pipelines, more upto date, the connecting cables that allow offshore wind turbine fields to access the National Grid.
Would also add Water Companies.
mespilus
Yes, I think double taxation is murky and shit. Why should anybody pay 12% of their income towards possible health and social care costs and then have to stump up a chunk of their house value at death?
Sure, there are strong a guments for inheritance tax. I agree that I can't write that off as unfair double taxation, but the dementia tax definitely is.
A person on the average UK salary could expect to pay £150,000 of national insurance between the age of 20 and 60. Not forgetting that employers pay similar into the pot. £300,000 per average earner...shouldn't that be enough?