Paying for old age

As it is a new year, I would like to start off with a light-hearted and amusing story. Unfortunately, I can't find one worth bothering with so, via Timmy, let's kick off with a coronary-inducing article instead.

Every adult could be forced to take out private insurance to cover the cost of their care in old age under plans being considered by the Government.

Taxpayers would have to pay hundreds of pounds in premiums every year while working, and would receive payouts if they later have to move into a nursing home.

The radical plan is being considered by ministers as a way to tackle the system of long-term support for the elderly in England, which is widely considered to be unfair, underfunded and too complex.

You fucking what? Look, you cunts, we already have a compulsory insurance system; it's called, entirely intuitively, the National Insurance system. We workers pay 11% of our salary into it, and our employers pay another 12.8% on top; over the next year, this is projected to raise £104.56 billion pounds [PDF]. Plus, of course, that felcher Brown, and his badger-faced sockpuppet, are planning to raise both sets of contributions by 0.5% in 2010.

So, where the fuck is my payout?

Oh, there isn't one, is there? Great. And now you cunts want me to pay privately, on top of that which you steal from me under threat of force? Fuck you, you shits: fuck you right in the ear.

I have been saying for some time that National Insurance is a massive fucking Ponzi scheme: people are told that their contributions is going to be invested over a long time, and the payouts used to pay for various benefits.

Lies. Stinking fucking Lies. The whole thing is a fraud.

Now, John B has previously pointed out that no one really believed that is how it worked.

I don't understand why taxing today's workers to pay today's retirees is viewed as a Ponzi scheme.

If we're going to get hardcore libertarian, then sure, I shouldn't be taxed to pay Sid and Doris Pensioner their gbp144 a week.

But if we think pensioners deserve rewarding for the time they spent working (and paying tax), then taxing me and DK to pay them doesn't seem like an obviously insane use of money.

The trouble being, of course, that now the government are feeling... well... a bit like Bernie Madoff did a few weeks ago, I imagine. They have taken all of this money and simply used the income to pay out early investors—and now they don't have enough money to pay out to the newer investors.

Whoops.

Isn't anyone else tired of the government lying to them about NICs? Isn't anyone else tired of seeing what is ostensibly their old age insurance being spunked up the fucking wall on fucking NI databases and subsidised bars for MPs? Because I am fucking raging...

Fine: I shall take out insurance for my old age: but I want the government to stop fucking taking my money every month and to return what I have already paid in. I will then happily sort out my own insurance over and above what I already do, of course.

For I already have a private pension (which I need, admittedly, to up the payments on), private medical insurance and private unemployment benefit. And I have signed contracts for them, so I know what my obligations are, what the insurance companies' obligations are, and what I can expect to get.

I have signed no such contract with the government. So, the state forces workers to make contributions—under threat of violence—and then simply decides to change the terms of the contract whenever they decide that they cannot be bothered to honour it; or when, having pissed all of our money away, the state decides that it cannot afford to pay for those things that it said it would. And, of course, with there being no actual contract, one has no recourse to the law.

It's a fucking shocking state of affairs. Over the years, this government in particular (but previous ones almost equally so) has wasted billions of pounds of our money—and now they are not even going to live up to the most basic of promises that they made.

They are an incredible bunch of fucking wankers.

UPDATE: the Whited Sepulchre is among a number of people who think that the US system is the same. [Emphasis mine.]

Here's Tim Slagle, writing in the December issue of Liberty magazine:

Here’s the reason why a private insurance program will always be a better option than Social Security: there was a slump in the market this week, but it will recover. Almost all the value it had will come back in time. On the other hand, everything you have ever paid into Social Security has been spent. It’s gone. Social Security is completely bankrupt, and trillions of dollars in debt. If it were a private corporation, its administrators would all be in jail.

So if you had your choice, whether to put 15% of your income into Social Security, or the stock market, where would you put it? And in a free country, shouldn’t you be entitled to make that choice?

First off, the total bankruptcy of Social Security has been brought to you by the same people who think they can regulate the stock market. But, I digress.

Let's take Mr. Slagle's statement a few steps further... Given the total lack of accountability in the Social Security system, I think that all of us—Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, members of the Green Party, and the Flat Earth Society—all of us would've prefered to put all of our money into the stock market from Day One, and do without Social Security altogether, right? There is no money at all in the S.S. fund. It's now a troubled Ponzi scheme. Surely we can agree on that much.

But what if you were only given the choice of withdrawing all of your contributions to Social Security and putting it into the market on the day before the recent financial meltdown? Would you still do it?

Of course you would. Unless we immediately open the border to a jillion Mexican teen-agers, there simply aren't enough people coming into the workforce to keep the current Bernie Madoff-style Social Security scheme afloat. It's doomed.

Quite.