My friend Andy Owen is an excellent copywriter and speaker.
One reason he is good is that he gets excited – he cares.
Here’s something he just sent me.
“A political consensus was reached by the EU Nations at the Laeken Summit
in 2001, that each member state would attempt to attain a basic pension of
40% of its average wage by 2007 and then work towards 60%.
The UK’s basic pension is 17% of the national average wage. Staggeringly,
most European pensioners receive a basic pension of at least 60% of their
country’s average wage.
The UK provides the worst basic pension by far.
Only Estonia (33%), Ireland (31%), Holland (30%) and the UK (17%) pay a
basic pension of under 40% of average wage.
In fact, taking the pension as a percentage of each country’s average wage,
you will note that pensioners in Greece, Luxembourg, Spain and Italy receive
over 5 times our basic pension.
Those in Portugal, Malta, Hungary and France receive over 4 times as much
and those in Poland, Czech Republic, Latvia, Finland and Sweden receive
3 times as much.
Slovakia, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Lithuania and Belgium receive over double. Whilst finally, Estonia Ireland and Holland have almost twice our basic pension.
If you ask me, it’s a bloody disgrace…
Let’s tell these buffoons in government what skinflints we feel they are.
They are quite simply laughing at us – the very people that have contributed all
their working lives. And they are doing it to such an extent, that we all get a
basic pension that is much less than people in poorer countries throughout Europe are getting.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/pensionpo…cd8cf0e.001e1c”
Now you – if you are British – may ask why we are getting less.
The answer is twofold.
1. An incompetent government which has managed with surefooted skill to focus on all the wrong things at the expense of the right ones.
2. All European countries have aging populations and most of them are going to find it increasingly hard, if not impossible, to fund those pensions.
One of the few, the very,very few, things successive British governments did get right in the last 50 years was to set aside enough money to fund pensions. Or such was the case until the Great Bliar and Can’t Count Brown, the Acclaimed (by the experts but nobody living in the real world) Financial Genius took over.
Now all that carefully set aside money – and hundreds of billions more has been pissed away on hiring nearly a million public service drones, foolish and tragic foreign entanglements, diversity training, failed attempts to improve hospitals, schools and other assorted bollocks.
Who says you can’t get the worst of both worlds? Only someone who hasn’t been in this country for the last four decades.
The problem with any government-run pension is that there is no such thing as a “carefully set aside fund.”
Our Social Security System here in the US is a prime example of the stupidity of taxing today’s workers to pay yesterday’s worker’s pensions–but then proceeding to give it away to every Tom, Dick and Sally that complain of a hangnail, but who never contributed.
There is no “Special Fund” carefully invested and piling up interest on my hard-earned contributions…it’s all pissed away on the ever-fattening beurocracy. They don’t run it as a business that must live within its means. They don’t know how–and I’ll probably never see a dime of it before the whole system goes bankrupt. Thank you very much, F.D.R.
Corporations, on the other hand, who wish to keep good employees fund their own pensions with 401Ks or the like, and some even give employees leeway as to how the money is invested, which is a better system (although we STILL have to contribute to the damn SS and Medicare–a total waste of resources).
Much better off to have people responsible for their OWN pensions. When Chile privatized its Social Security system, the boon to the economy was astronomical.
The US and British governments should take a page from that book–but no, they’re made up of career politicians…whose main aim is to spend as much of my money (and yours) as possible to line the pockets of those who keep them elected.
It is all very well for Mr Parcher to rail against the payment of state pensions, social security and Medicare, but what does he propose instead?
Does he really want every US citizen who has insufficient money to fund a pension for himself and family to starve to death when unable to work? Because that is what he is proposing. And for all those millions of people who even though employed, are unable to pay for the highest medical costs in the world, are they just to die?
In Mr Parcher’s ideal society the rich will become much richer and the poor, for as long as they managed to survive, much poorer. Is this really Mr Parcher’s vision for America?
What a crazy economic fantasy this is. Perhaps Mr Parcher would like to reflect on those countries in history who ran a system like this.
The Roman empire, for example. Though not as extreme as Mr Parcher’s preferred society, was the richest and most powerful empire on earth yet eventually collapsed and was defeated and overrun by a horde of unsophisticated tribesmen.
Mr Parcher’s solution is not only inhumane and brutal, but more importantly, STUPID.
It is in the interest of every citizen of the US (and even other countries) to ensure that everyone has at least a reasonable, if modest, standard of living because it makes good sense economically. By adopting Mr Parcher’s view that everyone has to look after themselves and no-one has any other responsibility to them can in the short term make him and his fellow thinkers very rich, but in the long term, remember Rome. As George Santayana and Aldous Huxley nearly said ‘Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them’.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Mr Parcher and his fellow thinkers are staunch supporters of the current Bush administration. Well, think about it. Your country has currently the highest national debt in history which is growing larger everyday to the point you are teetering on the verge of a massive recession. China’s US dollar reserves are so huge that it could easily mount a very credible takeover bid for the US. And even though the US military is unquestionably the strongest in the world it doesn’t do too well when up against unsophisticated tribesmen. Remember Vietnam? How are you doing in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Remember Rome, Mr Parcher.
How many people in history can you recall that became revered to this day as examples of leadership, strength and compassion because they grasped every opportunity to further their own wealth and disregarded everyone else?
No, if you want a society that is just, peaceful and prosperous you will not get it by judging everything by the (once) almighty dollar. Spread the wealth a little more evenly and everyone will become richer and more prosperous as a result.
A much better alternative, I suggest.
Drayton – this does not surprise me at all. And I’ve found the perfect solution to the problems those assholes have caused – I’m emigrating.
Not to mention all the ex-pats living in Europe that still get a UK pension!