UKC

Back of a fag packet calculations from an economist friend put the cost of the lockdowns (GDP collapse + debt incurred) at about £1 trillion for the UK economy alone. 

We could have spent £1 trillion on anything, but we decided to spend it on paying people to do nothing (so there are lots of forgone productivity costs here, too).

Post-covid economics will likely see governments trying to inflate the debt away. That is going to hit Generation X very hard indeed, as people in the age c.40-60 bracket tend to have already poor saving levels, which will now be crippled by inflation. This could spell a huge crisis in 10-15 years in terms of the impoverished elderly.

Millennials have already been faced with tough job prospects in the post-2008 economy, and in terms of long-run security and stability, see in particular the explosion of the gig economy. Gen X and Millennials make up the bulk of the precariat workforce that is now only being kept alive by a furlough scheme, that will end eventually. And then what? House-ownership has collapsed amongst this cohort, and 'generation rent' will still struggle to get on the housing ladder, generating long-run economic insecurity (the government's revamp of Help to Buy just helps those who already have money, whilst lining the pockets of private developers whilst not addressing the fundamental issue of house supply being far too low - it's actually a national scandal.)

Gen Z/Zoomers and below are either having educational development denied to them, or it is being severely impaired en masse, and will soon be entering the toughest economic landscape since at least the 1980s.

In short, what we have seen over the past year is the biggest redistribution of wealth from young(er) (Gen X, Millennials, Zoomers) to the old(er) (Boomers) in the history of humanity, because the long-run costs of lockdown - inflation to target debt; increased taxes, etc - will be incurred by the workforce, who will work to pay off the cost of keeping the mostly elderly, mostly retired, alive.

Maybe this was justified; perhaps trying to reduce the absolute number of deaths by severe social repression resulting in economic catastrophe was the correct course of action. It's not in itself unreasonable to think that sheer quantity of life is what matters, not quality of life (and for whom). Reasonable and decent people can disagree on this. Given the difficulty of making decisions in a rapidly changing environment with a lot of unknowns, the first three lockdowns were perhaps the right call.

But I'd suggest that, when the above is taken into account, no matter what variants might emerge in the future, and potentially especially next winter, there is a strong case for saying this third and final lockdown must, absolutely, be the last. Society owes the young, as well as the old.

Thoughts?

Although, as has been recognised by many posters in discussions on here for close to a year now:

• lockdown is not about saving the old
• lockdown is not about reducing the deaths
• lokdown is about preserving universal healthcare  
  • Universal healthcare is critical to making new people (as young as you can get) and to millions of young people with pre-existing conditions.
  • As a consequence of (somewhat) protecting universal healthcare, a lot of lives were saved from Covid - not just in "the old" but in many working aged adults.

If we hadn't locked down, hospitals could have been overwhelmed ~5x and we could have had an additional 450,000 people die within the space of 3 months in the second quarter of 2020. 

• I wonder what the immediate and knock on consequences of that would have cost the economy? Let alone what it would cost our humanity.

We should not have spent anywhere near the total amount of time in lockdown, but we locked down two weeks too late the first time in March 2020 and three weeks too late in January 2021, and this made the problem much, much, worse leading to more lockdown.

I will welcome another lockdown if it is needed, if it comes swiftly and is to allow the maximum effort to be made to contain the problems before they approach healthcare quaking scale, leading to minimum total time in future lockdown.  

It does, and it owes them a functional healthcare system.  The only other way I can see to do this without lockdown last March was to consign half a million people to die in their houses and then to use some of the army to dig some big holes to put the bodies in, and to use the rest of the army to deal with the widespread social unrest as hospitals refused to take people's loved ones for Covid.

You haven't run through the consequences of what happens when the pandemic isn't controlled.

Clue: it isn't economic growth.

The risk factors of death from Covid are old age, excess weight, heart conditions, diabetes, a high exposure to the virus (healthcare workers) and being male. How many people do you thing we have in this country that fit into those categories? Dead people don't spend money or pay tax.

And we don't know what the risk factors are for long covid, but around 10% of people get it, and its looking like around 5% develop diabetes. None of this is good for the economy.

As it was, with a lockdown, many routine medical screenings, treatments and operations were not able to happen due to lack of capacity. Sick people don't go out much and spend money and often don't work much to pay taxes.

Of course, if Wasteminster hadn't awarded massive contracts to people who couldn't fullfil them, or indeed hadn't gone down the route of massive self destruction with Brexshit, there would be a bit more money available anyway!!

A key point.  

The early stage of a pandemic we know almost nothing about is a force of nature that exists partly outhwith our control.  

The economy is much more within our control.  

Some people are clearly disadvantaged by the last year far more than others, and by the consequences moving forwards.  

We as a nation can choose to ensure that the cost of this is carried equitably - and IMO we should.  The pandemic is another lever to push growing inequality and division in the UK - collapsing healthcare is not a solution to this when the problems lie upstream of the pandemic.  Problem solving 101 - tackle the root cause.  The OP recognises the banking crisis as a lever of this widening devision as well as Covid, but does not apparently recognise that both crises act on existing fault lines within society, and those are where the remedy starts.

Reducing covid deaths has a closer link to better economic outcomes than it does to economic damage.

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-health-economy

https://theconversation.com/data-from-45-countries-show-containing-covid-vs...

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2020/12/18/covid-19-is-there-a-trade-off...

Whilst I'd happily pay any amount to have my family and friends still here, the fact is we could have locked down harder and quicker.  

We could have held lockdown instead of letting up too soon.  

This is why we are still in lockdown.  

Even now the chief idiot is determined to ignore Prof Whitty and get all the kids back to school at the same time because it appears to him more decisive.  

I hope that with the vaccines we won't need another lockdown, but if we do, then we do.  

The alternative would have been worse for the economy in any case.  

Forgetting the economic side for the moment.

Locking down reduced transmission rates, covid as we know moves from person to person so by keeping people apart it restricts the movement. 

Restricted the transmission means key workers are able to work in safer conditions. Looking past the fantastic job the NHS has done there are a lot of people that keep the power on, the water flowing, the food on your table, uphold the law, put out the fires, look after the kids so these people can go to work. 

All of these essential services have been stretched to the limit for years. Imagine the cost both in people and money if all the things we rely on stopped working. 

Going off-thread a bit but anyway...

If these contracts weren't fulfilled, then surely they would only have been (at most) partly paid. I don't know whether that is true or not, but surely the government won't have been allowed by the civil service to sign contracts that would pay up even without any fulfilment.

Please tell me it's so.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/06/fifty-million-face-masks-boug...

I mean, I guess they technically fulfilled it as they bought *something* with it, it just wasn't the thing that was needed!!

It’s simply a false dichotomy to say that it’s lockdown vs healthcare system collapse, binary choice with no middle ground. 

A politically toxic but nonetheless possible alternative would have been a choice to move covid cases to the nightingale hospitals and allow eg people in high risk groups to die in greater numbers, whilst not locking down, and keeping the rest of the NHS running in parallel. 

It would mean a lot more overall deaths. But it might mean less of a body blow to the economic prospects of the next 10-15 years.

I’m not so interested in what happened over the last 12 months, but whether we think it is sane to repeat them if, say, we find ourselves not out of the woods in October. I am perfectly aware that the pandemic has economic consequences of its own, but how those fall and on who is not equal. Similarly, it’s simply false to say that in the short term the younger and healthier are as dependent on a functioning healthcare service as the old and already unwell. The “it was to save the healthcare system, end of story” argument just doesn’t cut it. 

Using the governments own internal measures based on quality adjusted life years, in any other scenario it would be deemed unjustifiable to eg put people on over 80 on ventilators, taking up hospital beds that cancer patients in their 30s are now denied. Resources are scarce, but when it comes to covid we’ve decided to act like they aren’t, and try to save everybody who has it and presents with it, and say this was the only alternative to preventing healthcare collapse. But this just isn’t true. 

last march: yes

next October: much less obviously the case

No. You haven't understood exponential growth. There is no option of having a stable higher number of deaths. The trade off you think exists doesn't. Once the exponential growth picks up, it's lockdown or healthcare collapse: it really is that simple - you just haven't understood the mathematics.

They're not *as* dependent on it, but they are still dependent on it. There is no option of carrying on economic activity with no healthcare available. So you're happy to gamble that you (putting yourself in the shoes of a young person) just don't get sick? OK, we as individuals don't use the healthcare system that often. But what about if your wife, or kid, or parent gets sick? No hospital to look after them while you go out to work, what you gonna do? Suddenly the chances of needing the hospital are getting pretty high. I think I'd like to keep them running if you don't mind.

It really does. If the pandemic isn't controlled, the healthcare system falls over. If the healthcare system falls over, society and the economy falls over. There is no option of trading off some grannies for more money for the kids. The pandemic doesn't work like that, and yet even after a year of it, many people still haven't understood.

Really? Are you sure that the criteria for treatment have changed under covid? You're going to have to back that up.

I thought in general the very old were very rarely ventilated because it’s an intrusive and not very pleasant course of action that requires recovery time of its own? Hate to suggest this might be a strawman and all that, obviously.

I have a problem with your basis for claiming that this is possible.

You've had almost a whole year to education yourself about the challenges of this virus.  You don't appear to have used the time wisely,. 

One of the challenges is that it spreads from many people without symptoms, that the symptoms it produces in other people are wide ranging and have high overlap with symptoms of other diseases that also put people in to hospitals,  and that in the period you are describing we had almost no diagnostic capacity with which to implement the healthcare apartheid that you suggest was a possible alternative.  It took lockdown to control cases to the point we had that diagnostic capacity, and it took months to get the latency down.  Still, an RT-qPCR diagnostic - the best available - has a significant false negative rate which undermines the apartheid plan.

I suggest the root problem with this is that it simply was not possible scientifically, technically or medically.

I refer you to my earlier comment about you having basically failed to use the past year to educate yourself in matters you're now pronouncing on.  The demographic data on hospitalisations and ITUs makes it abundantly clear that most Covid patients over 80 never went on to a ventilator.

About 50% of hospital admissions have been for people below 65 years of age.  If we consigned everyone over 65 to die in a warehouse as per your alternate suggestion and released lockdown, due to the exponential growth mechanic, the saving in admissions would be cancelled by about 1.5 weeks of uncontrolled growth in the number of under 65s being admitted.

To be frank, you don't appear to understand what you're talking about.  I think it's clear a lot of people had effectively palliative care when you look at the demographics of ITU admissions.  You also seem to think that we can magically separate Covid positive patients from the others - something that is still challenging now, let alone at the start of the pandemic when there was almost no practical experience and almost no diagnostic capacity.

I’m trending towards that line of thought.  Vaccines, treatments, our increased knowledge - I’m optimistic we can avoid these types of lockdowns (but we could do mini circuit breaker things, or shove in other measures if needed). 

Many of ‘The Old’ were young either  during or shortly after the Second World War and I’d wager my house they had it tougher then than ‘The Young’ will have it in the near future. I just don’t think things will be that bad.

BUT: let’s not go down the divide and rule route (old vs young), it’s what the bastards want.

this.

If the answer is the half million extra deaths originally estimated (I’m sure it’s a matter of great contention to some, but with 100k already gone despite 3 lockdowns and with a functioning health system throughout I don’t think it’s that off the wall crazy) - could we survive an extra 50,000 per annum dead spread evenly over the next decade - almost certainly. An extra hundred thousand a year for 5 years - yeah, perhaps. An extra half million concentrated in an exponential peak and therefore spread over a few months of late spring into summer last year? I mean where would you put them all? Does this hypothetical scenario include mass graves, crematoriums running 24/7, all that? Because my guess is that it probably should.

And that’s before you ignore the impact on the rest of the workforce from those who merely become out of action for a few weeks - again, if it’s hitting everyone in a concentrated peak, does that level of sickness still allow critical services to be maintained? I don’t really know. But it feels like the sort of thing one ought to be fairly certain about before letting it rip, and I’m not wholly sure how anyone could be.....

For me the big benefit is that it has killed off Tory ideology. After the disaster and lost opportunities from Austerity we now have corporation tax rising (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56267284).

The tropes about fearing national debt and simply cutting tax rates for business to induce investment are now dead.

Sadly the stupidity of Freeports will do damage yet.

Yes. What this govt has done is flirt with The Brink, again and again. The OP thinks we can sit stationary on The Brink itself - for how long? - while still making money. It is just completely mistaken.

Yes that would be politically toxic. But it would also be cruel and immoral. You're basically proposing condemning large numbers of people to death through lack of care. To save money. How did you get to that point?

But anyway, given the rate that this thing travels I'm willing to bet you wouldn't be able to shovel people into the nightingales fast enough. It would outrun you and take us all down.

It's always worth remembering that economics isn't a force of nature. The way it is now isn't inevitable. It's something we made. And given sufficient will we can shape it

You do realise that 28% of our population are obese? That means more than a quarter are at high risk of death! Then there's all the people who are not obese but have other conditions, then there is the elderly population - nearly 20% of the population are over 65. 

Yes, there will be some crossover in these groups, but it is a lot of people at risk of death! Death doesn't help the economy!

And we already mentioned the long Covid issue too. 

Sickness and death do not help an economy!

This video from Alan AtKisson should be mandatory watching on degrees outside of the sciences.  

♫ You can run but you can't hide from all the exponential growth ♫ -  youtube.com/watch?v=bghbxemp4kQ&

Another problem with this "shove the sick into a warehouse out of sight to die whilst we let it rip" plan are the unknown consequences.  When Coel was questioning "should we let it rip because it's probably cheaper" back last April, I noted that "this virus could be a relatively benign precursor for something worse.  The fewer people it infects, the lower the probability of that mutation occurring."  [1]

By the time a worse mutation came along, we'd learnt a lot of lessons and improved care a lot.  Just imagine if something like the Kent variant with its increased transmissibility and possibly increased lethality, had emerged in May last year because we'd let cases run 7x hotter, to be shortly followed by a variant that evaded neutralising immunity and swept through the population again (see Manaus).

It's disappointing to see smart people framing such artificially limited questions around such a complex and multi faceted problem.

[1] https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/is_it_worth_it-717284?v=1#x9154...

Well done for having the courage to post your view

I understand Texas are about  to move to a 'let it rip' approach. 

I think UKC is a pretty good place to post.

  If you have a defensible argument. 

This has been done to death already here. There wasn't really any choice - you saw what happened to the healthcare system in April and then again in January, which was even worse. We came within a couple of weeks of the NHS being totally overwhelmed and unable to accept ANY patients. Lockdown isn't really about preventing deaths, it's about preventing the NHS from being overwhelmed. If it does get overwhelmed, life as we know it would come to a stop anyway. How many people would be going to the pub (or working in a pub) if they know that if they catch a bad case of Covid they will die because the hospitals are full? Better to have an orderly lockdown rather than a disorderly societal collapse...

I agree with several of your key arguments but not your possible conclusion. The key point really, whatever you think about the importance of preventing people from dying, is what Jon Stewart said - in a serious pandemic the economy is always going to be f*cked regardless of whether you lock down. If people are terrified that by going out they might contract an illness that could kill them or that they could catch unknowingly and then pass on to and kill their parents, then the majority of them won't go out. It's as simple as that. Many people have been avoiding activities far beyond the requirements of the rules since last March and that's why.

I do think there is a massive inter-generational problem, I agree with your characterisation of that and I think the over 60s in the country owe the under 30s big time. This was only going to get worse with increasing social care costs over the next few years anyway, and the pandemic has exacerbated it. The problem is, no individual over 60 is going to think they're the one who should pay, especially if they're not well off in comparison to their peers. But somehow, a solution needs to be found and a generation or two won't like it.

It doesn't work like that. If you have a general epidemic in the whole population, there would be far too many people getting seriously ill. Look at the facts - 40,000 in hospital in January despite us having been in and out of tiers / lockdown since October. That almost overwhelmed the entire NHS, never mind a few thousand beds in Nightingale hospitals (which they couldn't really find the staff for anyway). Sorry but your point is invalid.

Again, not as simple as that. Have a look at this for example https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55586994 which is an article from 11 Jan.

In the last few weeks, for example, adults aged 18-64 have accounted for 40% of daily Covid admissions to hospitals, data from Public Health England shows. This compares to 40% for 65-84 year olds and 20% for the over-85s.

A lot of over 80 Covid patients aren't admitted to ICU precisely because it won't benefit them - they will die anyway and/or ventilation would kill them (it's a pretty heavy going process).

IIRC, that half million was a worst case estimate assuming significantly overwhelmed healthcare, and a “no control measures” herd immunity threshold of about 80%.

Given that we’ve hit about 125k dead with <25% of people likely having had it, and with fatality rates in the second/third wave perhaps halved by lessons learnt in the first wave, and given the convergent appearance of mutation (suggesting it would have happens Quincey under let it rip) that raises that herd immunity threshold to more like 90%, and given what we now know about survival chances without healthcare, I wouldn’t be surprised if that half million “worst case” estimate turns out to have been more than a factor of 2x too small.  Before considering viral load differences between “let it rip” and stringent control measures.  Potentially terrifying stuff.

At least most of their public buildings, work places and households are air conditioned.  I suspect that’ll make a big difference.

Lockdown was necessary. Pissing away hundreds of billions in order to make sure the wealthy stay wealthy at the expense of impoverishing an entire generation wasn’t.

It might mitigate it but Texas saw an 80% jump (7-day average) in coronavirus cases since February 20. It's in this context that Greg Abbott thinks it’s smart to lift the statewide mask mandate. Texas also has the highest uninsured rate in the U.S., with 29% of adults uninsured as of May 2020.

It's a crazy social experiment.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/03/02/us/texas-governor-mask-mandate/index.htm...

It’s Texas.  

A state whose belief in independence and self support is such that they couldn’t keep the lights on for 3 days when it got cold.  I gather their independent power grid is basically so to avoid falling under federal laws on interstate commerce.  

To be clear, I don’t think their use of A/C will keep R<1 but hopefully it’ll slow things down enough that they at least get a chance to rethink it.  Keep the vaccine rolling out and they might just make it through without too much drama?  Bloody reckless IMO to have rising case rates during vaccination.  Perfect conditions for promoting vaccine evading variants.   

This is just another thing that the  'economy or the lockdown' types seem to either ignore, or reject as irrelevant. But I think it's pretty certain that would happen; they wouldn't go to the shops, or to work, or... so the economy is trashed, AND we have five-fold or more deaths, and however many more long covid/other long-term effects.

happened quickly... 

I sometimes take families through a "values" exercise in order to help discover what each individual family member's values are and then to see if there is comonality within the family group. There are a number of methodologies for discovering values and most of them are flawed because people tend to gravitate towards aspirational values rather than the ones they actually live. That said, there tend to be seven basic categories of values: Intrinsic, Mastery, self expression, inner development, lifestyle, tradition and relationships.

Intrinsic are those that tend to be central to funadamental beliefs and include: Integrity, Tolerance, Peace, Fairness, Trust, Beauty, Social Responsibility, Sustainability.

The problem is that single words aren't enough to actually describe what is going on so that it is quite possibe that both Ghandi and Adolf Hitler had the same values, its just that they implemented them differently.

So it is the other values that tend to support how you put your intrinsic values into place.

The predominant theme in my own values is self expression and this includes Adventure, Personal Freedom, Courage, Challenge and Curiosity.

Others might have predominant values that fall within the Relationship category and these include Belonging, Friendship, Teamwork, Collaborating, Family.

So, when arguments around Covid are presented to an audience, they tend to be viewed through the perspective of the individual and this perspective is closely associated with their respective values. 

I suspect that the predominant group on UKC who responds to Covid questions such as yours have a significant overlap in their values that might fall within  only one or two categories, hence the overwhelming unanimity in their response.

The upshot of this is that you are likely "flogging a dead horse"

Or it could be that most people here spot an intrinsically flawed argument that

• Ignores the importance of healthcare beyond Covid
• Ignores the practical difficulties of segregating Covid patients
• Ignores the practical and societal difficulties of half a million people passing in 3 months
• Misunderstands of misrepresents the demographics of both hospital admissions, deaths and ventilation use
• Pretends the economy would not be damaged in a let it rip solution.
• Pretends that the solution to pre existing economic problems lies only in the handling of the pandemic (which amplified those problems) and not how we choose to structure our economy.

To frame this as a difference of individual values is to overlook the many factually flawed premises embodied by the OP.  

They’re not flogging a dead horse, they’re trying to sell people on an imaginary one.

Interesting discussion this. So far the UK has shown that its track and trace is far from what would be needed to avoid high rates of growth from low infection numbers. Would those saying that no balance needs to be struck, catchily referred to as the Brink by Jon, be advocating full lockdown alongside full border closure until a vaccine has enough rollout and efficacy to protect against currently circulating and other including future variants?

I'm personally quite surprised that GDP 'only' fell by about 10pc in 2020.

I thought it was a reference to Jack Klugman's crusading Medical Examiner.

There's a lot simpler way to look at the question.

What are the actual choices? 

Oh yes, once you've thought about it, it's obvious that trying to minimise the pressure on the healthcare system and minimising the economic impact are actually the same choice. And that's the same choice as trying to minimise death. So that's that. The imaginary trade-off is imaginary, just like it was at the start, and in the summer, and at Christmas.

Can we please stop talking about the imaginary trade-off? It doesn't exist. It never did.

Me too; that was really quite surprising, but shows how much WFH we have managed in the last year.

I think that the enhanced contact tracing being used on the SA and Brazilian variants is a good model for this, and one that we could chose to widen as case rates fall.

Nobody that I have seen has ever argued that no balance needs to be struck.  We could end this in a month if everyone stayed home for a month.  It's clear that that's simply not possible, and that there has to be a balance between controlling the spread and healthcare consequences and keeping people fed and sane and not imploding the economy.

I take Jon's post to be referring to letting cases rise to the point that healthcare is overwhelmed to such a degree that 1/3rd of all patients are Covid patients, most other appointments are cancelled, and staff are discreetly triaging patients.  It's "the brink" because if control measures had been delayed by another week, the consequences would have been really quite bad.    I thought this was quite clear, and it in no way to me reads as saying "there is no balance to be struck", more that "we waited until the last possible moment for more control measures" - about as far from balance as possible really.

I have not seen anyone advocate for that.  Cases are falling well now and so long as they continue to do so, that's great.  Personally I would like managed isolation and quarantine on all inbound travellers until at leat the first jab of the vaccination program is substantially complete (not "full border closure").  I'm not advocating for it because my doing so will make sod all difference, but I'm happy to share my view - and it's because IMO the half-immunised state is the worst condition for spreading a partially vaccine evading variant (because it spreads in everyone and half the people don't have the health consequences blunted by partial cross immunity) , and there is too much uncertainty around the Brazil variant for comfort right now, and given the convergence going on the problem is going to arrise elsewhere.  As cases plummet in the UK, that elsewhere is increasingly likely to be abroad.

I think we have to watch the situation internationally - including collecting samples for genomic analysis in the UK using our hopefully soon to be spare sequencing capacity - and keep all options open.  My hope is that the current vaccination program will confer enough cross immunity to new variants one the next 12 months that their catastrophic health effects are blunted - especially with the earlier intervention therapeutics in the pipeline (interferon beta in particular).

But we just don't know.  Policy has become a lot more cautious recently, and IMO that is very comforting for our long term prospects on economic and health fronts.

Yes - not the disaster some had been predicting.  We're incredibly lucky that this pandemic hit when it did.  If it had happened 25 years earlier, the ability to work from home would have been substantially reduced and the vaccine programs we have seen would have been almost unimaginable.   It would have been awful

It isn't that no balance needs to be struck, it's that you can't let cases grow exponentially for long enough to threaten healthcare capacity. We import a lot of stuff we need so that would have to keep borders open for those things. That is a certain degree of balance being struck. 

The point about The Brink is that it's a limit at which no matter what you think your politics are, we go into lockdown. People would self-impose it if it wasn't forced by gvt. What the gvt can do is make everyone lock down when cases are low enough so it could be short and sharp, instead of long and drawn out. The closer to The Brink you get, the longer it takes to get back from it. So it's not a matter of advocating for "no balance" it's advocating for "strong early short action with the lowest impact on all measures".

Trying to flirt with getting as close to The Brink as possible is just an idiotic strategy, because as soon as you're anywhere near it, you have to lockdown *for ages*. If you actually let things get to The Brink, it would be economic catastrophe, rebuilding from total meltdown. 

There's no rational argument for letting society drift into disease and death and poverty. The economy isn't going to work with the healthcare system collapsed and people burying their families. That plan has nothing to support it.

Of course a trade off exists.
For example, Manufacturing has been allowed to continue with no calls for it to be stopped. Reason/Justification for that is that it is in theory a controlled environment (no public) and therefore it's allowed to continue as it's not only providing products that people need/want/desire, but also keeps a sizeable part of the economy functioning. 
The knock on effects of manufacturing continuing to run is also pretty important with regards to suppliers of parts, maintenance contracts, etc.
It's not perfect as reflected by the stats for various sub-sectors within manufacturing, but if you want stuff on the shelves/amazon, then there is a price to pay...  

 

Initially this was on for an 11/10 for sheer effort but as you replied to your own thread three times consecutively around 8:36pm +/- a couple of mins, it gets a still admirable 8/10

Yes, trade-offs within what to keep going within an "infection budget" exist. Different issue. 

What doesn't exist, which we are arguing about here, is a trade-off between more dead old people vs. economic opportunities for the young. 

The difficulty being that noone knows how far these variants have spread, not least in terms of the very few cases that would be needed to seed to an unprotected population.

I'm not sure there would be zero covid after a month and nothing would ever cross the border.

To quote Jon, 'Once the exponential growth picks up, it's lockdown or healthcare collapse: it really is that simple.'

Not explicitly but in the absence of a future proof vaccine, lockdown and border closure would be needed to drive cases to zero.

Unless a future variant puts us back to square one of course, in which case driving this variant right down would have been effort wasted.

Though I'm sure the economy would have been more badly affected in the absence of WFH, last year's data looks far more closely tied with lockdowns and case rates. There's a huge dip through March and April and a huge rebound through the summer. Would you have continued lockdown through the summer to near zero rates?

If we didn't have the vaccines on stream we'd have to go for zero Covid or else strap in for a hell of a ride... However with the vaccines coming along very nicely, in the UK at least, we can release the lockdown gradually and carefully until such time as everyone who can be and wants to be vaccinated has been fully vaccinated (the people who don't want it will be a risk to the rest of us but I think most of them will change their mind once they realise that they will be shut out of jobs / pubs / cross border travel without a vaccine certificate - I think this is on the way). Once cases get to a certain level (very low thousands?), T&T should be reasonably effective. It will then be a case of imposing (local) circuit breakers as and when needed. We might also need border closures but better to sink the aviation industry than the whole economy...

An exponential curve doesn't care where it is on the curve, it will just keep accelerating, but it does in terms of the absolute numbers. And in the case of a perfect lockdown it's a fixed time on the downslope. I'm not clear if you're advocating for zero covid and all that entails or a brink lower down the curve?

On the other hand, 25 years ago the world was somewhat less interconnected and it would have taken longer to spread, particularly cross border. Nor was there as much encroachment on the natural environment and hence less likely that this virus would have jumped the species barrier. To put it another way, this virus would have been less likely to arise in the first place 25 years ago. I think it's no coincidence that we've had several epidemics stemming from wild animals in the last 15 year or so. 

I was wondering that:  Not engaging with the evidenced based arguments that if you don't lock down you get loads of dead people and the same, or worse, economic impacts anyway.  Classic troll.

Jon said "you can't let cases grow exponentially for long enough to threaten healthcare capacity". Precisely where that point lies is debatable but we got very close in January - a couple of weeks.]

I don't think many people are advocating for zero Covid now, with the vaccines coming along. There may have been sense in going for near zero Covid last summer. Keep the lockdown going another month or so to get cases lower and T&T scaled up.

We got to a 7 day average of just under 700 cases a day at the end of June when testing capacity was around 100k / day. The real number of cases was perhaps double that level. So we weren't far off - pity T&T wasn't able to keep up and the government wasn't (and still isn't) willing to property support people financially if they tested positive.

This relatively low case count was despite BoJo's "go to work / don't go to work" shambles in mid May followed by reopening the shops in mid-June. Both of those things could have been delayed a bit further. I think what really kicked things off again through July and August was a combination of pubs & restaurants being opened and cross border holiday travel to places like Spain, France and Italy, where the second wave had already started. We could have kept (indoor) hospitality closed and overseas holidays banned. Hindsight is a wonderful thing though...

What I'm saying is we weren't that far off from getting it under control for good. Perhaps it won't have worked but it would have been worth trying, given what we know now. It's not like the second wave over winter wasn't forecast at the time!

neither troll nor classic! Minor disclosure, I sort of know the OP (well I have met him a few times ) 

I think what mostly happened is cronies were paid stupid premiums because they said they could source PPE at a point in time where reputable suppliers were saying none was available.

The cronies then sourced the PPE months later, when supplies came available again after the first wave was over and manufacturers had scaled up production, and the government stockpiled all the excess PPE arriving months too late it in containers on space rented at vast expense from ports.  By coincidence the port with the biggest PPE stockpile had appointed Chris Grayling as an adviser.

Fortunately, the simple measure of letting Covid go wild again over Christmas has allowed Government to get some use from its PPE stockpile so it wasn't a total loss.

Not just dead people but people off work for long periods with long Covid or side effects from ICU treatment.  Some of them will never be fully healthy again.  

Even if you are a total b*stard and only care about money you are better off with a lockdown than a lot of long term illness.

Wasn't Grayling the minister who did the "ferry contract with no ferries in sight" deal? If so then his "port appointment" is rather ironic.

My thoughts, without (yet) reading any responses, is that as the UKC demographic is heavily skewed towards the boomer generation, and a subsection of boomers that have have historically shown themselves to be insufferably selfish, that you will have an outpouring of disagreement with your economist friend. 

The unacknowledged kernel of their argument will be that "I'm alright Jack, screw you loser (once) working generation, just keep paying my pension benefits without complaint or expectation of ever receiving one yourself".

I'll check in in a day or so (or when I again need to lose my will to live) and see to what degree I'm right.

That’s definitely not my experience or understanding of the demographic of UKC. Yes, we’re probably mostly ageing men, but very few appear to be of the “screw you, I’m alright Jack” subgroup. IMO.

10 pc is huge in GDP terms. Consider the Financial Crash hit the economy by a few per cent and then consider the consequences over the last decade. It’s very difficult for most people to comprehend what the 10 point drop means. 

 

Are we mostly 60+ men?

I'd be full on amazed if that were actually the case...!

For sure.  But "seeding" isn't binary - the more cases that come in, the further it pushes us along an imaginary growth curve and the harder it is to mop up.  In the mean time, as I said, the enhanced contact tracing being used on these variants is good enough to " avoid high rates of growth from low infection numbers" with control measures short of lockdown - or at least to pair the growth rate back.

My point was that you'd claimed "Would those saying that no balance needs to be struck" when nobody was arguing for total restrictions.  You're right that what I suggested probably isn't enough - but that drives my point home more, nobody is arguing for anything even more restrictive again. 

I read your message as saying the options are to get to "The Brink" or to have total lockdown and hard borders.  That's just not the case.  We can have lockdowns and control measures when cases are low, or when cases are high.  Both push us back along the exponential growth curve.  Myself, I'd rather we did it before catastrophic healthcare overload was locked in rather than after.    

This just doesn't make sense to me.  If a variant "puts us back to square one" it's because it has sufficiently different immunity requirements that it's basically a separate pandemic.  So the effort spent controlling the first pandemic is not wasted - we saved a bunch of people and preserved healthcare during the first pandemic, the new pandemic is a new problem.  If you're in a house fire you don't stay put on account of perhaps wasting the effort escaping because you might get stuck in another house fire in a future year.

As it stands, future variants should have enough cross immunity I hope that their health effects are muted to the point healthcare collapse is avoidable with little to no control measures.  But this is only the case if we keep those variants out until (almost) everyone has immunity  from the completion of the vaccine program.

Another reason this doesn't make sense is that we don't go back to "square one".  By controlling the first wave, we learnt enough to significantly change waves 2/3 with proning, CPAP vs ventilation and Dex.  If we do have problems by October 2021, I hope that, for example, interferon beta and some JAK inhibitors will be out of trials and doing great things for early and later stage infections respectively.   Variants don't evade therapeutics in the way they (partially) evade vaccines.    

We didn't really have anything resembling "lockdown" by the summer to continue.   By July despite the weaker control measures we were down to ~600 cases/day and probably ~1200 infections per day.   Within 3 weeks we had the worst exponential growth rates we've seen since, including in our second and third waves.  In terms of moving us closer to the brink of healthcare collapse, August was the worst month we've had since wave 1.  

Rather than extending our non-lockdown I think not paying people to go to restaurants, keeping more restrictions on pubs and keeping Tier 1 rules would have moderated things significantly - we were close to the point where cases were low enough that local public health teams could have made a big difference to R, and we blew it all with poor messaging, paying people to spread the disease and the worst exponential growth from April 2020 until now.

Most of this is hopefully academic now given the effect the vaccine appears to have just started having on daily cases; assuming the roll out continues to a high % of people down to age 18 it's transformative and will hopefully blunt health consequences of new variants, allowing the to spread more like a cold, updating immunity as they go.  This sucks for people who choose not to get vaccinated, and they are likely to be large enough in number to risk healthcare collapse if we went back to pre-2020 style absence of all control measures - but only mild measures would hopefully be needed to "Stretch the peak" of unvaccinated to preserve healthcare; certainly it's hard to make an argument to lockdown to prevent them from becoming infected.

He has a point, though. The old do discriminate badly against the young during this epidemic.

The working generations incur massive losses in income due to furloughs and/or have to risk their health by continuing to work in supermarkets or schools.

Where are the corresponding cuts in pensions?

Instead, the discussion is about granting the vaccinated old privileges e.g. with travel, so they can enjoy their usual two or three yearly holidays abroad, f*cking up our climate in the process.

Even if the old had to be vaccinated early to avoid the health system from collapsing (which does make sense in general, even though I disagree about details of the prioritization), the lucky groups already vaccinated should share the pain of everyone else until lockdown measures can be lifted for all. Anything else adds insult to injury.

The Covid measures clearly show that the intergenerational social contract is dead, because the old, as usual, do not share the costs but monopolize the opportunities.

There must be a political price to pay, but I do not hold much hope! Probably that will only come when my children realize how f*cked their generation really is. As it is, my generation is squeezed from both ends.

CB

The acknowledged kernel is that letting it rip would be worse for the economy than controlling it, through lockdown when necessary.

The same jobs that are more protected during lockdown are the same jobs that would be more protected during the economic chaos following an uncontrolled pandemic.  

I think your argument flawed.

He does, but it's a point that stands alone and that is cheapened by making a serious of egregious misrepresentations about the purpose of the control measures, the demographics of the direct victims of Covid, and by ignoring the effects on the younger of collapsing healthcare. 

Indeed - and in the UK they are.  I see no sign of preferential treatment in our plans before the target unlocking date.  

Absolutely, but I'm not sure it's as simple as the old/young by any means.  It's more along wealth lines IMO and that's by no means a 1:1 correlation with age.  There are a lot of older people in zero hour jobs and precarious housing situations, and there's no shortage of young people polishing their PPEs and jumping on the gravy train.

The OP is fundamentally wrong IMO to suggest that shoving 2 million people into warehouses with limited medical care was the way to deal with this though.  This would cause a chaotic version of lockdown with worse economics effects.

There is a wedge in our society along lines of wealth and privilege and just as with the last financial crisis, Covid is hammering that wedge further in.  We don't solve this by letting Covid rip which just drives the wedge in anyway, we solve it by dismantling the wedge.

In the UK, by the time travel is allowed, "the vaccinated" won't be "the old", it will hopefully be 90% of people age over 18.  I think we're bonkers to allow mass travel this summer with all the uncertainty out there, but I'm in quite the minority I think.

Perhaps it’s time to start a thread about covid, inequality and the social contract rather than one that falsely presents control measures as being about saving lives of the old at the expense of the young.  We must be at about 30:0 in terms of the two types of thread by now.

This, precisely!

CB

I was actually thinking 50+ was ageing...... you’ve made me feel much older 

Its hard to miss it, or the fact that the all the countries in the world with high Covid death rates (Europe, Americas) have a lot of fat people. Not sure if this is national policy but our local vaccination call up listed obesity as a reason for vaccine priority - nice to know that poor lifestyle decisions now mean you get to jump the vaccine queue.  

Its not like nature wasnt already providing plenty of warning signs - obesity is already a risk factor for heart disease, diabetes, many cancers, and the NHS already spent more money treating obesity related illness than anything else. 

NZ has a lot of fat people as well. Obesity data across the world doesn't map so well to covid impact.

https://ourworldindata.org/obesity

The link you provide is data from 2017...  Citing a country that has not had an established Covid outbreak is not really valid either.

No they don’t. Some policies might, but not ‘the old’.  I reckon a lot of the old have been forking out to help their families, but I do think the ‘rich old’ should contribute more back.

You must know a lot of posh rich folk! Couple of coach trips to Llandudno is the best my elderly relatives can muster, unlike my climbing friends who are causing eco damage considerably more than any other group I know (flights).

When will you stop believing in the imagary trade-off? 

It is unfair on the younger generations, but that's life. There is no alternative that serves them better and is fairer. The society they'd go into with worse control of the pandemic would just be worse. 

Suck it up. 

They and other countries with a lot of obese people had outbreaks but decided to deal with their pandemic control in a different way: minimal covid. The results: very few deaths,  very few long term health outcomes (always more than the number who die), hospitals broadly functioning normally, very little economic damage, life normal most of the time except very strict controls on international travel.

They thought about prioritising based on kale smoothie intake, but given that the goal is to keep people out of hospital they thought it might be better to start with the people likely to end up in hospital.

There is a contradiction in your statement.

" Continuing to work and massive loss of income".That does not add up!!!Anybody working in schools or within the public sector etc will have incurred no loss. Anybody on furlough may have incureed some loss( but not massive).In that respect your assertion  does not stack up..

The loss of income is at those who have lost their jobs and been made redundant and cannot find work or for those self employed etc.

Not this old bollocks again.

One might as well say all GenXers are insufferably selfish and entitled.

People are selfish, people are not selfish. Old people are rich and old people are poor. Young people are poor and young people are rich.

The young always blame their problems on the old and the old always blame youth for being lazy. It is a sweeping generalisation that deflects from any real analysis of the problems in society

If you had bothered to read my post you might have spotted that I agree that, some details aside, vaccinating the elderly and sick first was the correct decision. So forget that "trade off" straw man.

I will, however, very much resent if some guy whose inflated pension* I am paying for were allowed to travel abroad or visit a pub before me, just because they were prioritized for vaccination.

They can very well share our pain, until everybody has at least been offered a vaccine. After that, by all means tie travelling or socializing to vaccination.

This kind of age based discrimination is nothing new, though, the Covid crisis just dragged it into the light.

As I asked above, why are pensions not cut in accordance with the average drop in working incomes due to furloughs etc., especially as the lockdown had to be so tight specifically to protect the elderly?

Oh no, that must never happen, pensioners reliably vote conservative, after all.....

F*ck them.

CB

*relative to what I can expect despite paying in much more than they ever did

Reading comprehension helps. Otherwise I have to assume that you deliberately misrepresent what I wrote:

CB

This was taken from the Financial Times on Aus

" Economic activity to the end of September was down 3.9 %"

That is greater than the  following the Financial crash.

To say they have had very little economic damge is questionable.

Its just too early to draw any assumptions either way on the economic damage.

...> But I'd suggest that, when the above is taken into account, no matter what variants might emerge in the future, and potentially especially next winter, there is a strong case for saying this third and final lockdown must, absolutely, be the last. Society owes the young, as well as the old.

My initial thought is;

Will you have the same opinion regarding "no more lockdowns" if the next variant is found to have a high morbidity rate in males aged in their early thirties, and is rampant within London.

The hit due to the effects on the world economy is likely more than that. I was making the point on internal effects due to lockdowns.

Maybe reread your post. which says .

""The working generations incur massive losses in income due to furloughs and/or have to risk their health by continuing to work in supermarkets or schools""

So I will stick by what I said.

I was making the point that it has taken a gdp economic hit which is still considerable.( I can tell but I recognise its limited, sales to Aus well down and just talking to companys over there).To suggest it has not been hit economically is probably wrong.

Anyway its still too early to measure and draws any realistic conclusions.So we should both recognise this.

You say this but it's far from proven from what i can tell. Do you think quarantine hotels would be in use if the other measures were sufficient?

I took it that those arguing against any economic/health trade-off would continue to drive numbers to approaching zero. Defensible but you need to be clear about border policies in the long term if taking that approach.

Agreed and of course there is a middle ground. But policies carried out during the undulations in this space quite obviously have economic as well as health consequences.

The question wasn't about controlling the first pandemic, it was about the recently increased caution as we descend the tail. We know the vaccines work against the UK/older variants and the rollout will gain immunity here. But the question of how aggressively to drive it down is impacted by the unknowns around future variants, and whether it's possible/beneficial to put the country into shielding mode.

I thought the common view was that it was likely that variants will emerge that escape current vaccines, and vaccine development will be playing catch up.

The question was about continuing the first lockdown, presumably until now. Do you think we would be without current restrictions had that happened? And what would last year's economic data have looked like?

I'm not so sure a potential choice between indefinitely closed borders and intermittent lockdowns is academic.

I'm not sure what you think is gained by vaccinated people "sharing your pain"? If we can't go into pubs or other businesses until everyone can, then these businesses stay shut for longer and suffer more. If some people can return safely, the businesses can get some money in. This is one where selfishness will hurt the economy, because some people can't bear to see someone doing something they can't yet. After 2nd vaccines, I think vaccine passports are a good idea to allow businesses to start trading again. 

You've also resumed this habit of replying to yourself, rather than engaging with those critical of our posts. You seemed offended last year when I suggested this was intentional and rude...... I'm surprised you would make the same mistake again.

Sorry, I don't know what your point is?  I'm talking about a potential future when case are down to the level of hundreds per day, not now.  Of course it's not proven here that enhanced contact tracing is enough to maintain R<1 with low case rates. On the other hand, it seems astoundingly obvious that it will reduce R - the question is, by how much?  Regardless, the more we can reduce R when outside of lockdown, the less total time we need to spend in lockdown

1. Paying people to eat out => more total time in lockdown
2. Paying people to do enhanced contact tracing => less total time in lockdown

We'll never know how well option 2 would have worked, because as we were getting to a point it was viable, we chose option 1 instead.

I don't think this is a valid extrapolation as the vaccine roll out is changing everything.  It would be very hard to argue for close to zero covid indefinitely with what we are seeing about the efficacy of the vaccines on both transmission in and serious illness, especially the reduction in serious illness of the over 75s. 

Although I would note that continuing a policy of zero covid has led to a bumper year for the economy in New Zealand so I think there is evidence it can be made to work as an approach, but it's also clearly got an iceberg in hell's chance of ever being accepted in the UK - and we've done very little in the last year to reconfigure the freight border towards that so any attempt would be starting from scratch.  It would also be hard to defend with the vaccines working so well.

The long term IMO is beyond any reasonable prediction right now.  We don't know how far this can vary - can it reach the terrifying IFRs of SARS-nCov-1?  Can the spike RBD keep changing in an endless cycle of vaccine evasion, or are a strictly limited number of configurations evolutionarily accessible?  

But nobody has suggested continuing the first lockdown until now.  I suspect would have been a disaster for the economy.  But there is a whole world of possibilities between endless lockdown and taking healthcare to the brink, twice.  Most of them are less harmful I suspect than these two extremes.  Trying to reduce the options to "endless lockdown" and "let it rip" is facile IMO, and is a good way of avoiding taking a long, hard look at the poor decisions made when trying to find a middle ground.   The worse the middle ground, the more total time in absolutely unavoidable lockdown, and the worse the economic damage. 

That doesn't follow for two obvious reasons:

Your £1Tn includes GDP depression, not just borrowing.

We couldn't operate an economy, even one flooded with cheap money were we completely over-run by covid. It's not either or, it's fix covid and invest in green (for example) or fix covid or do neither and suffer crippling losses.

Paying some people to do nothing for a while is how you stop covid destroying the portion of the economy that remained active, it's how we keep covid deaths in 6 figures.

If you don't have savings they can't get eaten by inflation.

Our dysfunctional housing market is a problem but it's one we're rather wedded to. It's not really covid related though.

Are you sure about this? Inflation eats both debt and savings. Good if you can borrow to buy somewhere to live for example (a political choice), bad if you're living off savings, bad if you're renting and it's not driven by underlying economic growth. Where the heaviest tax burden falls is a political choice, whether we build housing is in large part a political choice.

Of course we'll keep electing tories and they'll make the choices that suit them and their donors but that's our dysfunctional democracy for you.

It's not just about limiting deaths, not even primarily, if it were we'd have clearly completely and utterly failed. Controlling covid protects lives and the economy they support.

I think that's simplistic. Hopefully it's the last but if we need more control measures as the situation evolves we need more, deciding now to pretend it's no longer an issue whatever the emerging reality is daft. Government allowing hundreds of thousands of people to die in order that we can drink, dance and get Nandos doesn't protect our economy, mental health or the prospects of the young, we don't work like that as a society, it just delays economically damaging self imposed restrictions by a week or three until the devastating healthcare overload becomes not just predictable but no longer ignorable. At least where the restrictions are imposed by government it's clear to voters the taxpayer/government has obligations to those harmed for the greater good.

Lockdowns have a terrible cost. To ask and answer the question "is it worth it?" we have to also understand the cost of not locking down (economic, morbidity and mortality, also what becoming 'plague island' does our place in the world), we can't just look at the price of lockdown in isolation. Doing nothing isn't an option and what we've done has barely been enough.

jk

I find myself questioning what the OP's real purpose is, as most of the post appears to be an emotional Gish gallop looking to discredit known, effective control measures by using a very selective take on post events combined with some serious misunderstandings of the demographics involved.

Only a very small part of their post is about what we do in the future, and with any luck what we did in the past will not be of direct relevance, as the improvements in therapeutics, diagnostics and vaccination come together to transform our position.

I also agree that we could entirely do with it.  It looks like smoke and mirrors to distract from the real problem - our economic set up is manifestly unfair and divisive, and Covid has worsened that.  Some how I think the people to one extreme end of that divide are not troubled by this - far from it - and are all too aware of the benefits for them of disaster capitalism.  I do hope that the OP hasn't been taken in by their propaganda, which from what I can tell has been trying to hammer the Covid wedge in to that division for close to a year now.

Exactly. All the wriggle room and space for trade-offs exists in this world. We have lived for most of the last year outside this range - except for a period in the summer we've either been in lockdown or flirting with The Brink. The idea that we should go away from the space where trade-offs *are* possible, and move instead towards The Brink, where they are not, is incredibly stupid. 

Texas data  shows reduced success of testing.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/texas/

No it's not.

We lack the tools and capacity to hold a steady covid prevalence. It's growing, shrinking or oscillating between growth and decay with a significant period and amplitude.

If it is in growth, with a few percent of the sick needing hospital care you inevitably because of the exponential growth mechanic swamp the hospitals. That or we no longer have a universal healthcare system, covid is not treated as policy, if you get sick you take your chances outside the NHS. Even that doesn't fix things completely (ignoring the ~1M who'd likely die as a direct result of that policy), hospitals would still need to implement highly disruptive internal infection control measures and many procedures would have become practically undeliverable anyway in the midst of such carnage.

And that would have delayed disaster by maybe a week.

Bollocks. Who's going to be shopping, eating out, swanning off round the world for cocktails and sunburn while hospitals are barricaded by the army, food supplies pinch off (look what the French threatened then did to the border) and hundreds of thousands of us are being bulldozed into mass graves or burned like cattle in 2001?

My child was born during the height of the first wave. Had the epidemic been just a little bit worse so surgical care was less available my wife would have died. My daughter would have died. Neither had covid, they had very ordinary complications in birth. Allowing covid to kill hundreds of thousands of mostly older people doesn't prevent problems elsewhere in society, it exacerbates them and it'll still kill many tens of thousands of working age severely disrupting the economy (to ignore the needless excess death).

jk

OK, I see your point about paying for the covid debt with cuts to pensions. That wasn't the one I responded to, where you agreed with what looks like a "trade-off bullshit" post. 

It will cause resentment if oldies are allowed to travel etc first. But I also think it's a bit pointless to stop them, as that's only going to cause more economic impact on the younger generations. 

And where is that happening?

You seem to be ranting much more about pension funding than about covid. I suspect this is a grievance you have long held, and are now using covid as an excuse to rant about it.

I'm not a pensioner. I pay into my employer's pension scheme.

Quite. There's a rather unpleasant undercurrent to these sorts of accusations where people going through economic hardship look for some group to vent their spleen on and maybe take a few quid from.

It's worth noting that the state pension in the UK amounts to £10k a year so if you didn't save enough during your working life, your old age will be a bleak one. When you're thirty it is possible to escape financial hardship, when you're seventy it isn't.

Yes there are plenty of well off pensioners but there are plenty of well off people of all ages. If we decided to claw back money from any section of society then it should be based on income and not age. The same would apply to how that wealth was redistributed.

But, given the size of the bill, now would be a good time to ditch the idea that "you can't mess with people's pensions". For those who can afford it, the argument that the younger generations sacrificed a lot to save their parents' behinds so now they've got to take care of their share of the bill is compelling. 

‘’That’s luxury that is.  We had it tough, and I mean tough.  We used fut not get out o’ bed and not go tut work and still get paid 80% of our wage. Marcus Rashford would poop round wi’ free pies and caviar and mushy peas. We’d then do a quick 10 minute Joe Wicks and then sit around on our Covid arses all day drinking Prosecco waitin’ fut next Th’amazon delivery. And if you tell the yoof of today......’’

I am a bit hazy on the defining lines but I thought "boomer" was older (I saw born up to about mid 1960s?), then there's gen X and then millennials which covers up to nearly age 40 by now. Then gen Z and possibly another one below that.

There’s been plenty of these, often from quite sound people. Some poster last week reckoned 50 hospital deaths a day in Scotland  was an ‘acceptable’. When I pointed out this would be about quarter of a million UK total Covid deaths per annum, they disappeared.  Folk have had enough and are trying to develop a rationale for getting back to their version of normal. 

You’re probably right. I’m def a boomer. It was more a question of what defines as ‘ageing’? 
Although we’re all doing that from birth, but I would assume ‘ageing’ to over 50. Maybe I’m being ageist though.

I used to have that belief when I was 'younger' and paying a lot of income tax and NI. Nothing changes if we don't believe in helping society as a whole.

What have they sacrificed that has been greater than sacrifices of other generations? Two generations of the last century sacrificed the lives of their young men. My own generation saw the hopes and aspirations of many wrecked by long term unemployment and those who had jobs paying 8, 10 or 12% interest on mortgages leaving them with next to no disposable incomes for years. Most of this generation do have jobs, have had the opportunity of higher education, suffer less discrimination than at any point in history and haven't had to fight a war. I accept they pay far too much rent and shouldn't have to amass a huge deposit to buy a house. Housing will be solved by government policy, not by taking old people's savings.

..and anyway, saving their parents? Both my parents are dead but when they were alive I'd have sacrificed just about anything to keep them alive and wouldn't have thought much of anyone else who wouldn't. If this pandemic had affected the young rather than the old do you not think the elderly would have made sacrifices to protect their children? Don't you want to live in a society where we take care of each other regardless of age, colour or creed?

Something else that you may wish to consider, New Variants?

With much higher levels of virus being maintained in society, how long before Natural acquired immunity becomes ineffective? How long before a variant that is more lethal? 

Forget 500,000 deaths, we could be looking at a never ending wave of infections, Potentially affecting all demographics.

What would the economy look like then?

Big sacrifices in those generations. 

Violins for the boomers? Nope. 

Nope. The generations after gen x face a very hard job market compared to their parents, poorer opportunities to get on the property ladder and save. 

Fine. We're talking about who is going to pick up the bill. 

Yes. Your point? 

Yes, and that includes those of the older generation who can afford it picking up their share of the bill, since they were the ones whose lives were saved as the economy tanked. 

Do you think that the old and wealthy should have their pensions protected while the burden of debt is borne by the young? Or do you think they might like to chip in? 

Alternatively instead of cutting pensions just give everyone £134.25 a week

or only have pension schemes in which you yourself contribute to

But there's a whole generation with much of its wealth tied up in artificially inflated housing stock, given that you can't obviously have it both ways.

Yes, that's how people work. It isn't how governments work when they're elected through a distorting process and beholden to a few who pay their bills.

Yes but we very clearly and increasingly for some decades now don't.

jk

there is not one decent or accurate way of referring to other people in that list of terms

There have, and I get where they're coming from, and I can see how it seems entirely reasonable if you don't have the background to follow the maths through to the consequences.

On the other hand, I don't think that applies here one bit, and I believe I have solid grounds to do so.  

Yes,it really is ridiculous bollocks which almost nobody understands. Why not just use decades or quarter centuries?

Personal pensions / employer pensions are in effect tax-efficient savings schemes. You haven't contributed to them. Take away the tax breaks if you like. Do you want to raid peoples savings? What about kiddies ISAs? You could go after them as well at the same time. Are you just pissed off with people saving for a rainy day / retirement?

Ah, I had just assumed you were defining the same as the person you originally replied to (i.e. boomer = ageing):

I'm not requesting a string orchestra. My point is that shit happens to almost every generation, we have to deal with it.

No, I don't think so.

At the moment the bill will be paid by corporations, not individuals. I think that's fair enough and incidentally you might be disappointed by how little money is raised by for example a 1% rise in income tax.

Yes, that's the point I'm making. If some of this debt is to be paid off through personal taxation, which it currently isn't, then just increase the rate of taxation in one or more of the higher bands. Pensioners as well as richer working people will pay.

The state pension is a pittance, we should be looking to increase it not reduce it. If you are a pensioner with a substantial income then see my previous paragraph and my previous post.

I have no complaint with what I'm paying. The people deserving of help are 5-10 years younger than me and more.

Helping society as a whole is what we've been doing for the last year and will continue for a few months more at least. But the people who this has been most important to and who have not been so badly affected in the long term do need to recognise and recompense the groups in society who have lost most as a result.

What do you mean by having their pensions "protected"? Pension income is taxed like any other income. Are you saying pension income should be taxed at higher rates than ordinary wages income? 

I haven't got too much of a problem with that. Normally I would have a bit of a moan about the rules changing but I benefited to the tune of 40% when I made the contributions and at the moment will pay virtually no tax when claiming my pension

You believe that the bill will be paid by the increase in CT? Not by spending cuts and more taxes yet to be announced on individuals? (And no I don't believe that income tax is the only way to raise taxes, never said anything like that.))

I agree that the state pension should be increased for those who are dependent on it. I see no reason to protect for those who don't need it. I also don't see why public sector pensions shouldn't be cut where people can easily afford it. This has generally been seen as morally/politically unacceptable, and I think the pandemic changes things here, because it is those pensioners whose lives have been saved while the younger generations have to the bear the brunt of the economic carnage. And I agree with you that higher taxes on the wealthy (so long as they can't just be avoided) - and middle incomes - which would include pensions will be needed if we don't want the same old austerity crap to increase inequality even further (but of course that's what we'll get).

No, I'm saying that public sector pensions shouldn't be seen as "untouchable", nor should there be a rule of no means-testing for the state pension. The saving of the arses of the older generations has cost a lot to younger generations (not that it is possible now to trade those lives as exaplained above), and those who can afford it should chip in before they pop their clogs.

See posts above. I've got a public sector pension, an employer scheme and a private pension. If some of this gets chipped away at through cuts or taxes, then whatever. I've done fine through the pandemic, some people have lost everything. I want to see less inequality not more, and that might mean that I have to take a little hit on what I thought I was going to get in retirement.

Obviously that would piss me off if it was going to push me into any kind of hardship, but if I have to go on fewer or cheaper holidays, or drink less fancy wine, or just save a bit more now, then I can deal with that because I don't have an unjustified sense of entitlement.

Have you been vaccinated by any chance?

The problem with allowing the vaccinated greater privileges is the current vaccination process is based on those most at risk and those dealing with them. So you would have the frankly insane situation where those who were most at risk have the greatest freedom and the most healthy and low risk will be waiting the longest for their lives to return to normal.

It isnt selfish to not expect others to have greater freedom especially if it is those who were at most risk and have benefited most from the general sacrifice are now the ones having more freedom.

Trouble is, the oldies have now got a load of money to spend since they've been sat on it for the last year. Do we want to keep them locked up out of spite, or should we get them out driving the economy?

I agree it's galling.

I think we take two months to fairly and equitably get the vaccine rolled out.  As vaccination isn't 100% effective, especially in older people, and as "driving the economy" involves putting more young people in jobs with a lot of human contact raising transmission, this is a recipe for raising cases and amplifying any variants that partially evade immunity.  Which is not good news, if your'e old.  

You might assign "spite" to the motivation of some people, but I think there are sound societal reasons for continuing restrictions for all for a couple more months, in terms of giving the vaccination roll out the best chance of success and in terms of social cohesion.  The roll out is happening so quickly that the transition period is hopefully going to be brief.  IMO we're all better off all in this together - in terms of minimising risk to individual health, risk to the apparatus of public health, risk to the economy and wider social cohesion. 

Sounds sensible for a couple of months. But we'll still be in the situation where only the older/more vulnerable have had even one jab in 2 months time. If there are a lot of people out there who are immune and can't transmit, it does seem silly to keep them locked up when they could be out spending. Sadly, what we don't want is the unvaccinated going on holidays and having parties - which is exactly what the unvaccinated are dying to do right now! Tough choices...

I don't know.  We can now give 3m vaccines per week, and more vaccination centres are still opening.  The J&J single dose vaccine is likely to get UK approval soon I assume after it gained FDA approval, and we have 30 m doses ordered.  The current vaccines are proving to have very good efficacy from a single dose as well.  Bit of a blip from a supply issue in the last week but assuming things pick up again I think you could be quite pessimistic in that estimate.

I suppose that depends if they're burning their money in the mean time, or saving it and intending to spend it when the flood gates open.

 Further, as it's the younger people who won't have vaccines yet who would be out taking that money off them, and as the vaccines aren't perfect protection, I'm not sure this is guaranteed to end as you imagine. 

And if we let some people do all these things, it becomes all the tougher to convince the others to stay home and not go to illegal house parties, raves and so on.  Social cohesion isn't just about people being happy, it's about getting their buy in to control measures.

The target is `1st jab for everyone by end July - sure we might exceed this, but we're surely not going to be anywhere near all done in 8 weeks.

But your broader arguments I probably agree with, I think it's finely balanced though as some of the young gen will want customers asap. There are positives and negatives for all sorts of different groups all pointing in opposite directions, so it's far from obvious what the best strategy is.

That said, I think there is definitely merit in "all in this together" - although my fear is that that most likely means allowing the unvaccinated to party too early.

Hold on a minute, surely that's just a consequence of stopping the NHS going kaput. You can't have it both ways, either the measures are to save society as a whole or they're to keep deaths down. You can't argue one way one minute and then the other way the next (well of course you can but it's not really fair is it).

I do however agree that there is an argument that state pensions should be means-tested and that tax breaks etc on personal/company pensions may need to change (it's been done before when Lawson was Chancellor IIRC).

I think part of the problem with means testing state pensions was that the amount of money freed up was relatively negligible - maybe that's now changed with the increasing proportion of pensioners.

I actually think the long term answer may end up being universal basic payments to all - you end up with a much simpler (& hence cheaper to run) benefits system that only needs to deal with "extras" - e.g. more £ for disability costs.

It is fair, because both facts are true:

1. The oldies were the ones who were generally going to die from covid, and the economic costs are borne by the young.

2. The reality of the pandemic is that there is no way of trading off the lives of the old in favour of the wealth of the young, if we wanted to.

Intuitively, I can't see how it's negligible. 

Yes, maybe.

I’ll be surprised if we don’t exceed that target.  If the J&J vaccine comes online soon that’s a game changer as its single dose.  Two months might be optimistic, but we’ll see.  I suspect the effect of the vaccines is going to drive both R and cases down so much that timescales for relaxation may be safely revisited.  We’ll see.

I'd be more in favour of increasing taxation on private pension, rather than means testing the state pension.

Pension wealth was estimated to be 6.1 trillion in 2017. I would think taxing some of that should produce some non-trivial sums?

Why not both?

Could the government realistically get away with retrospectively taxing my money just because I have carefully been saving it for later rather than spending it?

If they can get away with taking away the money disabled people need to eat, then I don't see how it's so dreadful.

Normally I'd agree, but there is now possibly some justification for changing the rules. One I can't see people making too much of a fuss about is why is the personal allowance for a pension effectively about £17,000 compared to £12,750 for someone who is working. I've also said on another thread that there should be some sort of tax on the increase in your house price, this would affect well off pensioner the  most.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

Some of the young have lost their jobs.

Some of the old have lost their lives.

How about everyone who hasn't lost their jobs or lives pays for the recovery based on their income if an increase in personal taxation is necessary? 

How come? Because of tax relief on pension saving?

Seem a bit harsh to do both in one go, but when making my pension plans I've assume I won't be getting a state pension when I'm currently eligible (in 17 years time). So yes, if the choice was between that and kids not getting free school meals during the holidays, feed the kids. 

Moral arguments about who "deserves" their money aren't appropriate when it comes to funding a huge hole in the public finances caused by a pandemic and which has just got to be filled by whoever can afford it.

The money's got to come from somewhere, and deciding on the basis of the "moral route" someone took to being able to afford it isn't sensible. Either you can afford it, in which case cough up (I will). Or you can't afford it and you need the public services taxes are there to provide.

So just put up income tax then.

I was basing on the fact that you can take 25% of your pension tax free. So if take out £17000 a quarter of that is tax free and the rest is below the personal allowance.

The point is that pensioners haven't lost opportunities affecting their futures. And they are sat on a whole load of wealth that the young don't have. 

There is a disproportionate amount of wealth to be taxed from the old that is not there in the pockets of the young. But governments have historically been afraid to pay for public spending on the backs of the old because they vote. They would rather cut spending.

I'm saying that the pandemic somewhat cuts short moral arguments along the lines of "I've paid in all my life through my hard work I deserve... when the idle youths just smoke drugs and don't respect their elders...". Now, the old generation can fairly consider themselves an enormous burden on society, the protection of whom has cost the many of younger generations their futures - although there was no choice in the matter.

(I've put this in deliberately harsh language to underline the point that the "I deserve blah blah blah" is not going to curry favour with younger voters.)

If that would work, then sure. But my observations of politics over the last 15 years tell me that's unlikely and that if this black hole is ever going to be filled it's going to take more than income tax. Given how the chips have fallen with the pandemic, it looks to me like pensioners, not the younger gens, are the place to look for extra pennies for the kitty.

And they really did benefit a lot more than the youth from the spending, didn't they, so it doesn't seem exactly immoral or unfair to me.

It isnt spite its about equality.  Spite would be saying sod them lets vaccinate the healthy first to get the economy going again and have them try to self isolate.

I would say it is far more spiteful for the high risk people to turn around and go now I feel protected (lets also skip over the flaws in this thinking. Despite its misuse "herd immunity" is a thing) now its time to party.

The claims about the economy dont seem overly valid. Are those oldies really going to be enough to sustain the pubs etc on their own? I doubt it somewhat.

Then there is also the risk to those younger people who will have to be serving those oldies. Remember its unclear how well the vaccines stops transmission as opposed to illness. I guess f*ck them right. They can risk it now the highrisk population feel they are protected.

Yes given that some bits of the economy always keep going. But the difference is that this time there's expected to be a fairly rapid bounce back as opposed to 5 or more years of trying to recover lost ground.  

OK Boomer.

I'm perfectly proud to be Gen X because it is clearly the coolest sounding name, and we have all the best music. 

(edit to add: I'm pretty certain Robert is a fellow Gen Xers in reality, but it was just too a good a joke to miss! )

Plus seeding from overseas holidays in countries where infection rates had already taken off again.

Say about 20% of the adult population, so 10m but skewed towards younger age groups. I suspect it will actually be more like 10% as people will hopefully see sense but some never will and of course some can't have the vaccine for medical reasons. Some (many?) of the anti-vaxxers will have had Covid already due to not adhering to the restrictions properly. I guess it could still cause NHS overload but the unvaccinated will be protected to some extent by herd immunity from those who are vaccinated, so I'd be surprised if there would be an all out epidemic. What we could see I think is a series of mini-epidemics, probably regional rather than national, among certain demographics. Could create a two tier society - the vaccinated majority and a sort of unvaccinated underclass, who will increasingly found themselves shut out of jobs, pubs and so on. Hopefully that will help to make them see sense.

The real issue is the small % of people who can't have the vaccine for medical reasons. I don't know how many people are in this unfortunate situation.

It's not as simple as that though. For a start, there are millions of pensioners who are 'just about managing' on small pensions. Equally, there are millions of younger people who have done fairly well financially over the last year. For example, I'm 40 and have a steady job. I didn't get any pay rise and a much reduced bonus last year but that's in the rounding, the key thing is that I still have my job. I've been WFH throughout and have spent hardly any money over the past year because I've done far fewer climbing trips and hardly been to the shops other than the supermarket. There are loads of people in my situation. What has been difficult is zero social contact due to living alone and not going climbing but for me these are minor issues in the scheme of things.

In many ways, there is a jobs inequality - those who have seen a sharp drop in income vs those who have not. Those who risk their health in customer facing roles vs those who WFH. Even then, it's more complex. People on furlough have less income but presumably also lower costs in any cases due to not commuting for example. They also have time on their hands, which is valuable in itself. Some (not all, of course) will use that time to learn new skills or earn some money on the side.

So I think it's a lot more complicated than 'the young' vs 'the old'.

It's nice to know that poor lifestyle decisions which mean that people are more likely to end up in hospital if they catch Covid result in those people being prioritised for vaccination in order to reduce future pressure on the NHS. That way if I get run over by the metaphorical bus I'll be more likely to receive the hospital care I would need. 

From an economical point of view, it's better to have the pubs open for the vaccinated (over 60s, people with health conditions, health and care workers) than to have the pubs closed. 

I would doubt that. The likelihood they would make enough from just a subset of the population to actually make it worth being open is fairly unlikely.

There will be some pubs which will but not that many. So bye bye pubs if you force them to open.

The more cases we have at a time when vaccines are being rolled out, the more likely we are to get another home grown nasty variant. 

I don't think anyone is suggesting lockdown should have continued until now. It could have continued another month or so, combined with a ban on non-essential overseas travel. That may well have got us to a situation where T&T combined with tier 1/2 type measures and if necessary harder temporary lock lockdowns would have avoided the need for another nationwide lockdown.

Really? 

Pensioners may well have lost opportunities affecting their futures, in the 80's.

This wealth you talk of? A house they paid for that they need to live in anyway and may well have to sell to pay for their last few years in a care home? Or is it the pension fund they paid into for 30 or forty years that currently supplements their state pension? 

If you're earning a decent income, regardless of age then there is case for paying more tax on that income.

I'm not even sure, thinking about it, that I accept the premise of your argument. That young people are going to be disadvantaged for a considerable period of time. Unlike 2008 or most of the 80s the country will bounce back from this recession quickly. 

Put yourself in the position of a twenty five year old waiter currently on furlough. Would you rather have the chance of going back to work at the first opportunity and spend you evenings waiting on people over the age of 50 or would you rather spend another two or three months on furlough until everybody is fully protected because it seems fairer? I suspect many might take the view that being prevented from earning some money at the first possible opportunity isn't very fair.

Given how thin margins the average restaurant or pub is on I would be going for the 80% rather than 100% of part time wages before the business goes bankrupt.

It is fascinating how getting the economy back up as opposed to saving lives is suddenly becoming important for those who have been vaccinated.

Yeah right.

Is it?

If there is a safe way of starting up sectors of the economy before everyone is vaccinated then why not do it?

I don't think you've grasped the magnitude of this recession. The 2008 crash was bigger than anything that came before, and that's peanuts compared to this one. I think you're playing up the hardships of the 80s and playing down the current crisis to justify not having to make any sacrifice yourself.

I find it a bit ridiculous that you're trying to deny that the baby boomer generation have, on average, managed to accumulate far more wealth than those who came before or after. It's just demographic fact. You had your education paid for by the taxpayer, you went into the labour market at a time of growth and were able (because of the lack of debt) to invest in the housing market which has seen unbelievable growth shutting out younger generations.

I'm only asking that you acknowledge the facts and say "yes, we had it lucky, those going into the labour market post 2008 have it much tougher because of student debt and house prices, and those going in post covid really are f*cked to a degree never seen before in history.

True. But a moment ago it was you telling me that income tax wasn't going to cut it, was it not.

Oh no. No recession here. You had it much worse in the 80s, didn't you?

What does this actually mean in practice? The state pension is tiny anyway. The government could ditch the triple lock but that would hit the poorest pensioners hardest in proportionate terms. You could means test the state pension. You could make pensioners liable for NIC on their income. You could abolish tax relief for pension contributions. You could reduce the pensions lifetime allowance.

I'm not, I'm really not.

I'm not acknowledging it because it's unlikely to be true. In fact the end of your last sentence is real hyperbole. You think people had it easier in the 30s?

Straw man, there is a recession but we should bounce back quickly. If we do then the 80's will have been much worse than this recession. 

A house that is predicted to increase in value by over 20% over the next 5 years, at least they have the option of selling it? On average, a house they bought in their early 20's for 4 times their salary. Currently only 6% of pensioners rent privately. That is predicted to rise to 50% in the next 25 years partly as a result of people now needing  8 times their salary to get on the housing ladder in their mid 30's

For low and middle earners the tax advantages of this are minimal, once eligible for the state pension. It should be the same for people who were high earners.

It's not because pensioners don't pay NIC.

Which part about the debt, labour market or housing market is untrue?

No. I think that the baby boomer and gen x have had it much easier than those who came after, for the reasons I've given.

You have not grasped the magnitude of what's happened.

So you are suggesting that the state pension should be means tested, which is certainly an option although I'm not sure it would stand up in court for existing entitlements i.e. for today's pensioners.

Regarding public sector pensions, again I suspect cutting people's existing entitlements wouldn't stand up in court. It's certainly possible to freeze defined benefit schemes so they won't be available to new employees and/or stop accrual of additional benefits. Many companies have done this. However this would hit today's working age population rather than existing pensioners.

Even then, there could be unintended consequences because one of the trade offs in the state sector is that you get paid less but have a nice DB pension to look forward to. Take away the prospect of a DB pensions and the state sector would struggle even more to recruit quality people.

Your suggestion is not without merit but it's fraught with practical difficulties. An easier approach would be to have higher tax rates for older age groups.

That's of course true but then the uk population and therefore the probability of a home variant is something like 1/100. The question becomes whether you think it's possible/beneficial to keep the borders closed? We certainly appear to be edging towards this position.

Indirectly they were by saying that some sort of brink management wasn't possible. Unless you drive cases very very low then it's almost assured high growth will pick up again excepting the caveats around immunity/TnT which clearly weren't sufficient.

I agree it was very badly managed but  how to best navigate a corridor between elimination and clear catastrophe is far from clear cut.

The top two on my mind are cutting some public sector pensions and means testing the state pension, for starters. But you've suggested some more ways you can get money out of the pensions of the well off and into HMT.

FWIW from Canada:

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/frankly-stunning-gdp-growth-puts-bank-of-canada...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canadian-economy-weath-recession-rebound-1...

But they would no longer be most at risk, that's the whole point. If you do it the other way round, you would find out rather quickly that the 'healthy and low risk' aren't actually as healthy or low risk as you might think... An uncontrolled epidemic in the 'healthy' 20s to 50s would still swamp the NHS and result in loads of deaths. 

No one is going to force them to open. If they think they have enough of a market based on local demographics and clientele, they would open.

You're the tax guy!

I don't give a shit what the details are, I'm in no position to say what's most practical I just think that the moral argument ever-wheeled out by the old, "it's mine, I deserve it, I earnt it" has evaporated. It has evaporated because the benefits of controlling the pandemic, which has had astronomical costs we've got to pay for, accrue to us all, but are vastly more concentrated amongst the old who would otherwise be dead. And without change, the costs will be borne almost entirely by the young.

So we are in a position to be looking for new ways to raise taxes. And I think the pensioners who can afford it should be directly in the line of fire.

More like 3-4 months especially given the need for 3 weeks for the first jab to become effective but even then it's a relatively short period. I certainly wouldn't advocate opening the pubs any earlier than the proposed timetable, for anyone. There is perhaps a debate to be had about restricting pubs and restaurants, particularly indoors, to those who have been vaccinated until July/August.

You seem to have ignored the previous paragraph where the group being compared against where the boomers. Which is a fairly standard tactic of the boomers to compare themselves against the generations before who did suffer hardships and so decided to try and improve the country vs the boomers who benefited from those previous generations work before booting the ladder away.

Apart from the cost in lost education etc will last a lifetime and, of course, the 80s did at least result in a bit of a reset of house prices as opposed to the last recessions where everything else has been sacrificed to keep them up.

Don't go bringing nuance in to this. We all know that the old gnaw on the bones of the young whilst cackling with satanic glee. There's even a book about it called "The Protocols of the Elders" or something like that.

well yeah. I know when I worked in pubs the margins were tight enough that without the younger people out on a friday and saturday it would really struggle.  You would struggle to give enough work to keep people ticking over.

Ohh because all the people who havent been vaccinated will look at it at say f*ck this for a game of cricket I am going to do what I want. Remember those who will be waiting the longest will be in the lowest risk bracket.

Note I am not opposed to starting sectors up but what I am against is the rather insane situation where we have the system flipped on its head and those who benefitted most from lockdown are released first.

Yes, it's called a wealth tax and some countries have it, although I don't know if it applies to pension pots. I'm not a fan of the concept as I think income / gains rather than wealth should be taxed, for the reason you mention as well as because a lot of wealth is illiquid (pension pots are completely illiquid until a certain age / retirement). 

Its not nuance its a distraction. Yes of course some pensioners have been shat on. However on a population level the 20yo equivilent will be shat on far more especially when they hit pension age when the idea of a "small pension" will really be rather small and they wont have even had the chance to buy a house on the cheap.

It depends how soon we approve the single dose J&J vaccine and how soon our supply of that can come online, and on how much more the current supplies and their delivery rates are going to ramp up.  Single dose is a big game changer over the current plans that are based on two dose vaccines.   I’ve been wondering if we’re going to see a change to the classification of existing vaccines but I don’t understand enough about the processes to know if that’s plausible.

I think that’s going to depend a lot on the case numbers.  It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that if we stick with the current reopening schedules, that the progressive effects of the vaccination on R mean that we’ll be very close to elimination in 2 months time.  At which point - unless we are on a stated policy of zero covid -  it’s hard to make a case for ongoing closures, so long as there is an immediate reversal of measures if cases start cropping up or rising. I’m not going to advocate to open anything up sooner right now, but I think policy has to respond to the changing situation - cautiously and progressive when it gets better sooner than expected, and hard and fast when it gets worse at any point.   I think it is a really interesting couple of weeks ahead in terms of case numbers.  

Perhaps I am too optimistic today.

It’s one thing to restrict the right to enter as a customer, but restricting the right to work based on who has or has not been *offered* the vaccine crosses several lines a think.  Many staff will be amongst the last to be offered vaccines.  
 

Plenty of room for nuance. I'm not asking that the pensions of those who are struggling be raided, nor that the youngsters who've done well in the last year be granted tax relief. I'm saying that now, when you've had your arses saved by the younger generations working in the vastly overstretched NHS (and delivering your groceries to your front door), is not the time to be claiming that the treasury should not be getting its hands on your "hard earned" pensions to pay the wages of doctors and nurses.

It just seems a little gauche, don't you think?

In practice, this would only work if the tax is charged on any gain made when the house is sold. Otherwise you end up in a situation where people have to pay tax on a hypothetical increase in value (which could be reversed in future if the market falls), without deriving any cash from the increase in value. This is called a 'dry' tax charge. The assumption that the tax payer might have other income and/or liquid savings to pay the tax won't be applicable in all cases. Consider a granny living on a meagre pension in a large family home which happens to have gone up in value. She would have to sell the house and buy a cheaper one to pay the tax, which would result in unnecessary disruption and costs for her.

Besidesu   w, it is simply impractical to assess hypothetical valuation movements for millions of homes. The system would grind to a halt under the weight of all the appeals, for a start!

I think you are misunderstanding how the 25% rule works.

Is that right? How many pensioners have been placed on taxpayer funded furlough? How many pensioners work for companies which have received taxpayer funded loans, some of which are never going to be repaid? In actual £ terms, it has been the working age population which has overwhelmingly benefited from government support. Pause for thought?

I don't see how being on furlough is a benefit of controlling the pandemic. The benefits of controlling the pandemic are still being alive and having a hospital for your medical care. Then there are the knock-on benefits of still having an economy in tact in which to participate - this is how the younger gens benefit, but it is a smaller benefit than still being alive. There are benefits to controlling the pandemic for all of us, but by far the greatest benefits go to the old who would otherwise be dead.

It's a totally different point. The money that the govt has hurled out to save the economy hasn't gone to pensioners, granted - but the benefits of all that money being spent are still concentrated among those most at risk from the virus. 

A bit overly dramatic. I think a more accurate description of the situation would be that some working age people have lost (or will soon lose) their jobs or have suffered a significant reduction in income. These people number in the high hundreds of thousands or low millions. It's certainly not anywhere near the majority of the working population or even the younger working population. This group have certainly suffered and this is an issue but they are a minority of the working age population.

There is a second group of working age people, which is certainly in the millions, who have at various times over the past year (or in some cases throughout the past year) been on a taxpayer funded holiday with a 20% reduction in their pre-tax income. This would have involved an associated reduction in work related costs such as commuting.

Finally, there is a group of working age people, which is actually the majority, who have carried on as before with no or only a slight reduction in their income. This includes the vast majority of public sector employees as well as many private sector employees.

So it's certainly not as simple as 'the young vs the old'. I think it's far more complex and nuanced than this. Unlike the OP, you know / agree that the health vs economy argument is not binary. It's the same with the young vs old argument.

Furlough is 80% of pre tax earnings (capped at a level above the earnings of the average waiter), so once you take into account the fact that the reduction to their post tax earnings will be less than 20%, their potential savings on commuting costs, their likely savings from not being able to spend money on going out and the possibility that they've moved back to live with their parents instead of paying rent, the financial driver might not be as strong as you might think. The bigger driver may well be the desire to actually do something meaningful and see people!

I think we can all agree that it's hard to get the balance right. You have to manage the situation and it could have been managed much better by coming out of L1 more cautiously.

As for borders, keeping them fairly tight for must of this year makes sense to me. Better to keep the aviation section on life support than to risk aL4 due to some vaccine evading variant...

I'm still working to pay for the crumblies extravagant lifestyles.

You're quite right this needs funding. I don't have an issue paying increased taxes whilst working, as that's when I can contribute the most and can take a bigger hit to finances without undue hardship.

No problems with paying NIC on top of tax on the pension, but if you raid pensions (didn't Gordon Brown do that already), which are effectively savings, then why not go after savings accounts and ISAs as well, share the pain?

Also how do you apply a wealth tax to illiquid assets like property? I think forced eviction and house seizures if pushing things a teeny bit, so maybe death taxes would be better (that'll piss the kids off).

It's not as simple as just taxing the old bastatds.

I'm thinking more about the people in the latter stages of education now.

Everyday I see a bunch of people of all ages. When I see a five year old, I think "what do you know - you won't even remember this". When I see a twelve year old, I think "this'll set you back a bit, but by the time you're leaving school it will all have come out in the wash". When I see a 17 year old my heart sinks.

When I see a 25 year old who's on benefits my heart sinks. When I see a 35 or 45 year old who's lost their business my heart sinks. But those in the 50s with a stack of earnings underneath them? They're doing fine. And the pensioners? Ha! They're all driving BMWs where I am. These are people of the same socio-economic backgrounds as the 35 year olds who've lost everything. Their grandchildren are the ones finishing school with severely diminished prospects and having had some of the freest time of their lives robbed from them by the pandemic.

It really is as stark as that. The pensioners have benefited the most and paid the least. The ones who can afford it should be first in line to start paying for the clean-up, on top of the corporation and income tax. Otherwise what? Oh yeah, cuts to public spending just to give all those at the bottom of society who've suffered most and who've fallen the furthest behind a really hard kick in the nuts from which they're unlikely to recover. That's what's coming next, because the dickheads of this country will probably vote Tory again.

I'm hearing a lot of "what? me? pay for this?" from the older generation on here. Yes. You. And me. And others throughout society who can afford it. Don't complain about inequality if when the shit hits the fan (and it really has, this isn't the 80s) you're not prepared to pay up yourself, you think it can all fall on the corporations or on the youngsters earning more than you did at their age. It's not going to cut it.

Sure, that's me, and I'm prepared to pay more tax to clean up the mess.

It's not like the health vs. economy false choice, because there *is* an average of each age range. You can trade off taxing one group more than another and increasing spending more as a result. 

A hell of a lot can happen in the almost half a century before the currently shat on 20 year old retires. They may even be doing better than the Gen X pensioners by the time they retire.

Details matter. It's easy to say 'rich pensioners should pay' but it's not actually practical, legal or indeed fair to take away their pension pots / entitlements. The reason it's not fair is that people save towards retirement with an idea of what level of pension income they might reasonably get. If you then move the goalposts once people have already retired, that's not exactly cricket, is it? Still, fairness aside, I don't think it would be practical or legal.

What you can do is increase income tax rates generally (i.e. make all better off people pay), which I think would be both practical and fair. As I've explained above, the young vs old thing is a false dichotomy anyway. It's more about rich vs poor, those who kept their jobs / income / pensions vs those who lost their jobs / income. You could introduce an age element into it by increasing income tax rates for pensions and/or charging NIC on pensioners including on their pension income. 

It's not as simple as that, but it's one ingredient that seems to be seeing a lot of resistance. Always does. They're not used to being seen as a reservoir of wealth to be taxed, because govts have never liked to tax them - because they vote. Better to leave the kids to pay it all off after we're dead, isn't it?

I'm saying that the fairness (moral) argument evaporates when without the control of the pandemic which we're asking you to pay for, you'd be dead. It just doesn't have quite the same resonance in these circs.

As for legal - change the law, that's why we elect governments.

Yes I agree. But I think there has always been a bias protecting well-off pensioners because of the way they vote, and I want to see that bias go up in smoke given how much of the public finances that demographic is responsible for spending just now.

That would be the day! I'll believe it when I see it... Indoor pubs and restaurants are set for mid-May so that's not far off your 2 month estimate anyway. It may be possible to bring the mid-May date forward a couple of weeks but that's about it. There may be a bit more flex on the midsummer date. I don't think any flex in the mid-April date would be possible or sensible.

I was referring to customers. I'm not advocating it - there would be pros and cons to consider. However ultimately it may be academic if we get close to elimination anyway.

How much of the public finances has my self isolating for a year  84 year old mother spent? And how much should she pay back?

I dunno. How much has she got stashed away?

You are saying the government has spent all this money so we now need to pay it back over time. I don't disagree, although as ever it's all a bit more complex than simply paying it back (debt to GDP ration, impact of inflation on real value of debt, etc). Most of that money has benefited the working age population in financial terms. This is all a financial / fiscal issue.

The benefit for pensioners has mostly been intangible - protection of their lives (at the expense of social isolation). Yet you are saying that pensioners need to pay for it. That doesn't entirely make sense to me. Yes, they've had an intangible benefit but they haven't had much of a financial benefit, so why should they be singled out to pay for it? To my mind, it makes a lot more sense to tax the better of in society (such as myself!). 

Both of these statements would be more accurate I think.

Incidentally, whilst I think wealth taxes are generally a bad idea for the reason you mention (as well as due to the possibility of asset values falling in future), I'm not against expanding the remit of IHT. It would be emotive but it's effectively unearned income and in principle it's fairly liquid as long as there is a reasonable timescale to pay. It would be problematic in some cases of course. 

I think we are agreed that the OP's view that the lockdown is all about saving old people's lives and goes against the economy is missing the point. Yes you seem to be using these same arguments to support your position that the pensions must pay for this. I think we are agreed that the lockdown was also about preserving healthcare capacity and preventing general economic and societal meltdown. I think it would be fair to say that all ages benefited from this and in fact the working age population would have a lot more to lose from an economic meltdown. It follows that pensioners should not, in fact, be the only ones who pay for this. I just think you have a bit of a bee in your bonnet about this for some reason.

You can see it that way if you like, I can see a broader policy context, as follows:

1. There has always been a bias to protect pensioners from making a proportionate contribution in a progressive taxation system. E.g. receipt of universal benefits, lower tax on income, scores more you can tell me all about. 

2. The government was seriously considering just building a huge funeral pyre of everyone over 65 as a way of dealing with the pandemic. 

3. Given that instead of 2. we spent a huge amount of money continuing to live in a civilised society, perhaps now is a good time to rethink 1. 

For the reason that the situation at the start is 1. and needed to be addressed anyway. I'm just leveraging the fact that the pensioners escaped Cummings' funeral pyre as a way to make the point. And I stand by this: the moral argument "I deserve it, it's my hard earned" which you've invoked as to why they shouldn't cough up simply doesn't stand up when it's to pay the wages of the doctors and nurses who've just saved their bacon. As I said, the moral argument used to support the unfair bias 1. has evaporated.

As I said: The benefits of controlling the pandemic are still being alive and having a hospital for your medical care. Then there are the knock-on benefits of still having an economy in tact in which to participate - this is how the younger gens benefit, but it is a smaller benefit than still being alive. There are benefits to controlling the pandemic for all of us, but by far the greatest benefits go to the old who would otherwise be dead.

I think you're not putting much value on still being alive when you would otherwise be dead were it not for public spending, whereas I see that as rather an important benefit.

He'll be able to harvest a sizeable amount of honey pretty soon...

My take on it is that lockdown had much wider benefits than keeping pensioners alive. Like keeping a lot of younger people alive as well. Should anyone who is not a pensioner but is clinically vulnerable also be expected to pay more? And keeping the economy from collapsing, which benefited everyone but particularly those of working age employed in the private sector.

Intergenerational fairness is an issue to an extent but the age divide is nowhere as big an issue as the wealth divide.

On what basis, given that we're talking about post peak first wave and you've already discounted continued lockdown until now and zero covid?

A year seems like a significant underestimate to me if you're interested in avoiding variant exchange. When do you think the developing world will have been vaccinated?

Wrong 

I think we're probably permanently rogered

I did say effectively, so it doesn't apply to everyone. Our plan was to use a withdraw £170k from two of our pensions between the ages of 55 and 60, we can probably avoid paying any tax on that either by taking out 25% at the start and then about 13k each year or by spreading that lump sum out over the course of those five years and effectively taking out 34k between us without paying any tax. 

You really do need to start qualifying your assertions about groups.  You are generalising at the moment to the point of untruth and offence (the kind of offence that is made by being told that one's age group is privileged, reardless of individual circumstances, life history and lack of current income)

At the moment you are looking like a ranter - I know you can do better   (ps you are not alone in this - there is another generally respected poster earlier on in this thread who has fallen into the same trap)

Could we talk about "The entitled" sector, "The Wealthy" sector etc as being labelled by generational untruths is not very nice?

I agree, it won't happen and would be difficult to administer.

I wouldn't propose taking the full amount, perhaps 25% of the increase. Over the last decade that would have raised around 100 billion from home owning pensioners, which to me seems a significant amount. Why would someone be forced to move house? Isn't that like saying an investor can't pay a £4k tax bill after their portfolio has increased in value by 20k, because they have no other income/savings? OK, accessing the equity is more difficult and you would probably only get favourable terns from family members. IMO part of our housing problem is caused by the likes of my mum and  Mrs J's mum living on their own in 4/5 bed detached houses. Forcing them to downsize is wrong, but I haven't got anything against a little encouragement. 

No, because they don't benefit from an unfair bias to begin with. Once you acknowledge that pensioners (on average in the context of progressive taxation, blah blah) have always contributed less than their fair share due to their voting habits, the arguments for continuing this after the pandemic make absolutely no sense. The trouble is that the pandemic has hugely exacerbated inequalities, with huge lasting impacts for the younger generations and I don't think the magnitude of the costs to correct this can be met without a fundamental rethink of how much those who can afford it should be contributing.

I don't think for a minute that this will happen. We'll just get spending cuts and an increasingly shit society to live in. 

Inequalities are age skewed but that's not the fault of the older poor who can barely afford to heat their homes. People like me should be paying more tax and benefits for the poor should be higher.

Totally agree. I've been pretty clear that the changes I would like would be progressive and not hit those who can't afford to pay more. 

Which say a house owning couple need about 25k for a "comfortable" retirement. A start would be 40% tax (not sure that 50% isn't unreasonable) on anything above that.

I have a brother who is 35, he has pretty much made the same life choices as I did, I'm not sure some people appreciate how much worse of he is than I (50) was at the same age, even though he has been "helped out" by the family to the tune of nearly 100k. I have nieces at secondary school/uni. (different brothers) I think they are going to be reliant on similar help, which i in limited supply to most people. 

Surely you mean "there has always been a bias protecting well-off pensioners because of the fact that they vote." Adequately off pensioners, like myself, don't all vote the same way!

The intergenerational (un)fairness argument has again been prominent in this discussion. I've argued on other threads that the today's older generation (I'm just 70) generally lived considerably more frugally in their youth than today's younger generation would regard as acceptable. And older people certainly can't be blamed for the disinclination of younger people to vote.

But on this occasion I will agree that those in my position should be contributing more. Not because I'm old, but because I've done (relatively) well out of this pandemic. Yes, I've been denied most of a year's climbing (which matters to me at my age - not many years left...) but I've not caught COVID (yet), I've been vaccinated (once) already, and my personal finances are healthier than a year ago, because my pension has been unaffected and I've not been climbing!

I would have supported something like a substantial temporary (eg 3 year) hike in basic rate income tax which would have clawed back from those in my position, coupled with a significant temporary rise in the lower tax threshold to compensate those less well off, as a result of COVID or otherwise. A rise in the higher income tax rate should also have been part of this package, though that would not have affected me in my retirement.

That's perhaps an economically simplistic view, but I see nothing in the recent budget that will help equalise the hugely unequal economic impact of COVID between those who have lost jobs or businesses and those whose incomes have been pretty much unaffected - not all of whom belong to the older generation.

Martin

As wintertree and I have outlined above, taking the brakes off less quickly could have got cases even lower while giving the fledgling T&T system more time to become effective. Say another 4-6 weeks for most measures, particularly those related to indoor environments. Coupled with earlier imposition of local measures to contain local outbreaks. I also think that if people knew then what they know now (L2, L3, loads more NHS strain and loads more deaths), there would have been a lot more people arguing for going for zero Covid at the time.

By late this year (may be as early as September if things go very well) everyone who wants to be vaccinated will have had two doses and the necessary 'activation' period will have elapsed. Booster vaccines might also be authorised and available by them. At that point cross border travel could resume with most countries and with certain precautions, eg vaccine passport or recent negative test.

You might want to check whether fair value movements on investments are taxable for individuals.

'Dry' tax charges are very nasty things. You might not have cash available to fund it and you could end up paying tax on something which is never converted into cash. You suggest a 'dry' tax charge on 25% of a valuation gain. That could still be a lot of money over time. For a pensioner on a meagre income it could be a lot of money in a given year. That granny might have to sell that 4 bed house after all...

I agree but what has that got to do with age? You just seem to have a bee in your bonnet about pensioners, when in actual fact a lot of pensioners are not well off at all. Those who have decent pensions have worked hard and paid into the system during their working years - same as you and I are doing now. We can tax pension income the same as employment income (abolish the '25% tax free' rules and introduce NIC on pension income). We can also switch off tax relief on pension contributions, although note that this impacts future rather than current pensioners. However anything beyond that would not be fair to my mind.

It all comes down to how much those who can afford it should be contributing. We can certainly have a debate about that but 'those who can afford it' are not the same as the pensioners.

40-50% tax above £12.5k per person, which is the current level of the personal allowance and is less than someone working on the minimum wage would earn? That's crazy! For a start, the level of tax avoidance and evasion would go through the roof.

Hang on, you're talking (common) sense, which surely isn't allowed on the UKC forums

Don't  worry,  it'll never gain any traction, bit like suggesting a 1p tax rise to pay for a better  NHS ........

Perhaps that was a bit low, but they will have far fewer outgoings than people on minimum wage. If you look at the breakdown from which nearly £4500 was allocated for holidays. I don't think the comparison with families on minimum wage is fair. What do you think the threshold should be? I think 38k was for a luxurious retirement, with about 13k on holidays? 

For people who are current receiving their pension I'm not sure it would be easy. Even if they did something as simple as removing the tax break on the 25% lump sum/annual amount, I'm not sure I would know how to avoid that, even if I had the the inclination. I don;t know this so might be completely wrong, but people I (an me) know who were paying higher rate tax but not on ridiculous salaries, have easily avoided paying tax by saving 40% on contributions and only paying standard rate on a relatively small fraction of their pensions. I'm not convinced they will go to any great length to avoid paying a few thousand in tax. I've always had the impression it's the next level up who already pay accountants to avoid (and evade) paying tax, in ways I don't understand. 

Edit. after looking it up and finding out that basically our pensions for the next 17 years is similar to a couple both working 40 hours a week on minimum wage. I'm uncomfortable that they might be being paying some tax and we won't. While our incomes over that time might be similar, our lifestyles will not be.

Definitely going to go round in circles here I'm afraid, but what it's got to do with age is that pensioners don't pay their way in normal times (bribed for votes) and the pandemic brings this into sharp relief. They often seem fond of making moral arguments as to why someone else should pick up the bill ("my hard earned") - which you're supporting - and I think this is now especially unjustified since they're the ones using the lions share of the resources while the younger generations are bearing enormous economic/opportunity costs. The point about them getting the greatest benefit from lockdown (not being dead) is just the emotional icing on the cake. 

I agree that we, the working, didn't actually have the option of throwing them all onto the funeral pyre (that would have been cutting off our nose to spite our face), but that does not make it any less true that the benefits of the pandemic response accrue more to the old (if you count staying alive as a benefit, debatable perhaps) while the costs are borne by the young. 

This is all in the context of a progressive system where those who can't afford it wouldn't be asked to pay more - I've been clear on that. 

Great. I don't see why someone with a whopping fortune should get the state pension though, it's just burning public money. 

Absolutely. That's the argument I'm making. Those who can afford it include well off pensioners who aren't currently pulling their weight, and are relying on moral arguments to defend that position which are now utterly defunct.

The bee in my bonnet has been particularly aroused by people on the left who will claim to care about inequality, but think that someone else should pay the colossal costs to the younger generations, even though they can afford to contribute more. "It's my hard earned" is not a good enough argument. It never was, and now it's just an insult to those whose futures have been decimated. 

We are indeed going round in circles so I will stop there...

The easiest tax issue on pensions is to scrap the triple lock. It would save a small fortune. I expect the that to happen at next years budget.  

But it will financially hit alot of pensioners where they only get the state pension. There are a surprising number of them around in deprived areas. 

it’s not all gold plated pensions. 
 

Aren't you yourself "making a moral argument as to why someone else should pick up the bill".

As to paying their way, how many pensioners do you think DIDN'T pay their way before they finally retired, including paying their taxes so that you could be educated (and looked after by the NHS).

Any change to the current situation is only likely to persuade those about to retire to continue working for "a few more years" in order to accrue money for actual final retirement. That will mean jobs that could have been taken by youngsters not being made available, and so increasing youth unemployment - which is bad enough already !

It's financially troubling at the moment for retirees, with low interest rates affecting the actual monies receivable (from personal pensions) to pensioners being somewhat different to when they did retire. Personally, whilst I could retire this coming December, I'm having to take a long hard look as to whether or not I can afford to do so, and as I do not wish to just sit at home watching the TV and doing nothing else but wait to die, the likelihood is that I may well continue working for some time.

It's exactly what I'm not doing. I've said that I'm prepared to take a cut to my public sector pension, and pay more tax on my employer/private pensions. I'm also prepared to pay more income tax. So no. I support higher taxes to address the horrific inequality exacerbated by the pandemic, and since I haven't been harmed by the pandemic, even though my earnings are modest I can still afford to pay more than I do. I am not hard up and I've got 4 pensions (including the state).

So what. I'm paying for the next generation, that's how it works. This is the exact argument I'm disagreeing with: "I've paid in when I was working,. so I should no longer have to, even though I can afford it, even though there's an enormous hole in the public finances, even though the control of the pandemic has saved my life at the cost of the futures of the young". It's a terrible argument.

Maybe. Doesn't sound like a good reason not to collect tax to me though, given that I'm not talking about raising tax from those who are going to struggle. Sounds a lot more like scratching around for an excuse to maintain the status quo where pensioners don't pull their weight.

Someone's perfectly happy to generalise about a whole group now. There are lots of retirees for whom it is not "financially troubling" in the context of the burden borne by the young. The violins you're requesting for those well off pensioners are drowned out by the sound of the jet engines of the planes they'll be flying in, the flash cars they drive, the second homes (not that they make a lot of noise but you get the idea)...

Extraordinarily unconvincing. More "what ,me?".

As I said, I would like to see a larger state pension for those who are dependent on it, and means testing.

Maybe this might be a good place to start, tax avoiders, companies and individuals, also, let's stop people hiding money outside the country. That would help everyone, and it would be those that can afford to pay, that would be paying.

It's a terrible argument because it's generally not true. The older sectors of society are generally paying higher taxes than the young, and they are paying, and will continue to pay for a large part of the furlough. And to misquote you, it's probably one of the biggest transfers of wealth from the older to the younger generations in our history. Most of the elders are not complaining: they are happy to more than pull their weight. (Where do you get the idea that pensioners, overall, are not pulling their weight? ) The only pensioners who are not paying taxes are on meagre pensions. Very few are a burden on society, except for those who have been hospitalised. Some pensioners are lucky to be able to afford good care homes. They are sitting on sufficient cash piles to pay for these, but those piles are like deflating cushions and the only question is whether their longevities will outstrip those cash supplies. Most of this cash to care homes is effectively going back into society in terms of jobs and wages. This is taking a great burden off society.

Do you just mean that they've got more money and so they pay more in absolute terms? I'm interested in who's paying the greatest proportion of what they've got to spend.

That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue. Paying for furlough is only a small fraction of the additional demand on public finances following the pandemic. If you think we just need to pay for furlough and then it's all fixed, please think again. We'd already had over a decade of austerity and a shitty divided society as a result; we've got Brexit demolishing the economy; and then we've the pandemic on top. If people can't understand that it's necessary to actually make some sacrifice to keep this pathetic nation from descending irreversibly into a miserable third rate, divided pigsty then we have no hope.

So, we have no hope.

They pay less tax as a proportion and get universal benefits, as bribes for votes.

Oh, they're paying *some* tax! Thanks for pointing that out. My mistake, since they're not paying zero tax, then that's fine. How could we ask for more?

This is cherry picking to misrepresent what's happening on average. You're right that money going into care homes is usefully going back into the upkeep of society, but less than 5% of pensioners live in care homes! 

Get to grips with the scale of the problem and realise that everyone who can afford it should be paying more tax. The future for this country is bleak because no one is prepared to pay for the costs of keeping society working to a decent standard. If you've got a second home and take multiple foreign holidays every year, that means you can afford to pay more tax. And that goes double for those who are currently paying under the odds as a bribe for their votes. 

Misha has outlined the changes that would be helpful and progressive; I would like to see universal benefits means tested as well.

...The future for this country is bleak because no one is prepared to pay for the costs of keeping society working to a decent standard.

That's a feature across ALL age groups, not just pensioners.

If you've got a second home and take multiple foreign holidays every year,

The people I know who are taking MULTIPLE foreign holidays every year come principally from two age groups - some pensioners (who've got good private pensions), and working teens/twenty-somethings. Maybe if this latter group didn't spend quite so much money enjoying themselves "in the now" they could save some money to have a home of their own in the future - and wouldn't be complaining about "all those rich pensioners". The age group in between seems to have children that take all the money.

..... And that goes double for those who are currently paying under the odds as a bribe for their votes. 

Politicians will always "bribe" voters with promises, most of which they fail to keep - "£350 million per week for the NHS" anyone - in fact you could say ANY political promise is a bribe, and that includes supposedly being "green", equitable, BAME supportive, and anything else you could think of.

I see no good reason why the very rich (i.e. Branson and so forth) should receive free TV licences or heating allowances. Apparently the problem is that it is more expensive to weed out the well off than to include them - I would however like to see the TRUE figures for this statement.

Yes, they pay more in absolute terms and more in proportion because the UK has a progressive tax system. Hopefully your interest in this will lead you to look up the facts.

I agree with you here. I have never suggested that if/when we pay for the furlough every thing is fixed. I agree that austerity was a very bad economic policy, and that Brexit is a disaster. (You wont find anyone more anti-Brexit than me - and my brother.)

Again look it up. The better-off pensioners pay a higher proportion of tax (generally much higher) and are not eligible for most of the benefits. (BTW, I am not complaining.)

It is very insulting to sneer at their "some" tax (and "not paying zero"!!!), when many are paying very large taxes.

I am not cherry-picking. I am picking a group that you want to tax higher, and pointing out that they are disposing much of that back into society. They are not a "burden".

I have got a strong grip on the scale of the problem and I think it is appalling. And I think we are probably going to have to pay more tax across the board. Across the board means that the better off *will* pay a higher proportion of taxes, because one can't get more tax out of people with no surplus income. (Again, I am not complaining here: I am in full agreement with progressive taxation.)

You will find that the benefits are effectively means-tested. The better off don't get the benefits, except for one ridiculous (but rather trivial) thing - the Winter Fuel Supplement. I would certainly scrap that for the better off.

One tax that doesn't seem to get talked about much, which is everywhere, is VAT on goods. It's a non-progressive, flat tax that is effectively a "hidden" tax on the less well off. I am dead against large flat taxes and I think VAT on goods is much too high. I also think something has to be done about the extraordinary tax advantages that the online sellers (most notably Amazon) have over the high street. What is even worse, is the disproportionate amount of the extra profit as a result of that advantage is going into the pocket of Bezos himself, rather than those of the Amazon grunts.

Any estimate for healthcare and economic costs of health effects that are only now starting to emerge?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03360-8

You clearly have not followed the discussion (Misha and I above). I think you are accidentally, not deliberately looking straight past the relevant facts:

The relevant comparison is of two people, one working, one retired, with equal incomes. The pensioner has got 25% tax free and pays no NI. The pensioner draws the state pension and other universal benefits. 

Why you're asking me to look up the facts is beyond me, when it's all laid out in the discussion, and I've just repeated it here for your convenience. Pensioners are not pulling their weight, because the government hands out universal benefits and gives tax exemptions to pensioners in exchange for votes. The defence of this consists of flimsy moral/psychological nonsense: "but NI isn't tax, it's "savings" that you pay in and get back as your state pension later". "Why should we pay the same tax on this income when we "deserve" it - we spent all those years working to enjoy the second home, tw*tmobile and foreign holidays". This is what I disagree with. I don't care if people feel they're entitled not to pay the amount of tax they can easily afford. I care whether they can afford to contribute or not.

The point I'm making over and over again is that now, when the lives of the old have been saved at the expense of the prosperity of the young, is the time to rethink this engrained nonsense about what you "deserve" in retirement. You don't deserve anything by virtue of not working, you should still have precisely the same responsibilities to contribute towards public services as you did when you working. If you can't afford it, fine, you shouldn't have to endure hardship. If you can afford it, cough up. That's how it should work for the working and the retired, equally.

But still getting their 25% tax free, paying no NI and picking up the state pension. I'm staggered by the generosity, I really am.

No. The group I want to tax higher are the pensioners who can easily afford it - those with big private pensions, second homes, etc. You're only picking 5% of all pensioners on a health criterion - that's not the same group! It's cherry picking. 

And I've been totally clear again and again, that I'm arguing for progressive taxation that treats pensioners the same as the working, where they can afford it. The attempts at rebuttal seem to be "they can't afford it". I'm not suggesting higher taxes on those who can't afford it!

Absolutely. I guess VAT does generate a lot of revenue but it's not the fairest. A VAT cut could probably help people who are struggling out quite a bit. It should go without saying that I would like to hit internet giants and tax avoiders hardest, before the well-off pensioners. But that doesn't let the wealthy pensioners off the hook.

True. But pensioners pay lower taxes, receive universal benefits and have just had their bacon saved at great cost to the younger generations. A little appreciation of the impact saving their lives will have on the rest of us for years to come would go down well. Maybe with a few quid from those who can afford it so we know you mean it?

I don't see how your little swipe at youngsters who've lost so much of their futures to the pandemic contributes anything.

That's no justification for bad policy. Shall we just accept the government targeting spending in marginal seats and leaving the poorest safe Labour constituencies to rot too? Politicians will always bribe voters, what's the harm?

Re VAT - again it's a bit more nuanced than that as many essentials (eg a lot of food items) are zero rated or reduced rate (5%).

I know there's arbitrary distinctions drawn between cakes and biscuits, previously razors and tampons, etc. But I would have thought a VAT cut would still be helpful for people who struggle to afford the weekly shop. Don't see why this couldn't be clawed back from Bezos, wealthy pensioners, etc.

Pensioners do not pay lower taxes. They pay the exact same as anybody working. All their pensionable income as taxed just like a salary or wage. Even the state pension is included in that calculation. So universal benefits are taxed if their income is about the personal allowance. 
 

I have no idea where on earth you get this idea that pensioners earnings are tax free after 65. 
 
I am not pensionable age but helped parents with their tax forms . I can assure you there is no magical box you tick saying your income is tax free after 65. 

Incorrect. See above.

?? Read again.

The 25% tax-free assumes you are taking income from a non-state pension - so that's not every pensioner, some may have invested in property as their pension (maybe that's got other tax-breaks), etc. Although you could remove that 25% tax free (possibly taper it off over several years to avoid the unfairness of it being done suddenly in one go), one of the problems is that the 25% tax-free is an incentive for people to save for their retirement, and removing this might reduce the amount people save for their retirement with the obvious consequence of increasing the number of "poor" pensioners in years to come - which means extra will need to be contributed by the working population of the time.

NI should be scrapped and included with Income tax. It is completely ridiculous to have 2 taxes on employment income and call one of them a tax and the other an insurance, and then to have different thresholds, rates, etc. Needless complexity. The money from them is not kept separately for separate purposes, both just go into the pot.

Also, it's not like the NI goes into a fund that grows until you retire, today's tax/NI income pays for todays state pension, another reason for NI to be merged with income tax.

Doing this would tax pensioners the same as everyone else and would (IMO) be the fairest way of implementing something to redress any generational imbalance.

Thanks for engaging with the actual facts - refreshing!

Doesn't sound likely to me, it's certainly not something I've ever thought about when organising my pensions. I want a certain amount to live on in retirement, and I put away what's either done for me, or what a dude on the phone tells me I have to to achieve that. If I don't get 25% tax free, I'll put a bit more away, next time I review it.

Exactly! NI feeds these stupid moral arguments about "I've paid in all my life..." which I'm sick of hearing.

Works for me. There is the matter of giving the state pension to the wealthy too though.

It’s complicated but fair to say that most fresh cold food is VAT free. The irony is that poorer people eat less fresh food. 

In the breakdown I get from HMRC, telling me where the government spends or will spend my taxes, the third item down is State Pensions (12.4%) and the amount I pay on that item is nearly twice the State Pension I receive!

Being able to take 25% of your pension fund is a relatively new thing.

Before that none of  your pension fund could be withdrawn and it had to be used to buy an annuity.

So my nominal £30,000 pension fund would earn me an annuity of about £400 per year.

It would be hard if not impossible to convince people to pay into a pension fund with returns like that.

Hence one of the reasons for allowing the drawdown of pension funds.

It's also why folk in their 40s or 50s reduced what they paid into pensions and bought buy to let property. The return compared to many annuities was better and you still own the asset. 

Annuity rates have unsurprisingly become a lot more competitive now you have to choose to buy them!

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/annuities-709024?v=1#x9038851

I also found my old thread on the tax allowance changes linked to poor financial control by HMRC and probable additional intergenerational unfairness.

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/hmrc_problems_+_intergeneration...

Not before time, it's was kind of some vicious circle. Low annuity pay outs helping boost insurance company profits, their share value and the pension funds that invested in them, making folk think they'd have a big pension to look forward to!