Stirlingsays
Member
- Country
England
Who was your grandfather stroking ?
Stoker.....fecking spelling!
After that he got a job in the print.....Murdoch and technology came for that one as well, but he'd retired by then.
Who was your grandfather stroking ?
Do you think you could live on £22k a year without financial help?image
Bloody luxury, when I was a lad ...Do you think you could live on £22k a year without financial help?
The fault doesn't lie with pensioners, it lies with how the economic system has developed since the seventies....money going to money with less agency and resources for joe bloggs.
I'm not sure how that gets easily fixed.....I think you're going to need the massive collapse that they narrowly avoided in 2008 for the kind of dramatic steps required.
Because while I can't stand the neoliberal and left's social policies both the DR and far left are critics of the super-rich's monopoly on international wealth....Amazon, Walmart, Apple, Google, ExxonMobil, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase avoiding taxes compared to their past counterparts......They all do it because they can.
Like I say, I don't think it'll change willingly.....and I'm not looking forward to the proper collapse either....they will do everything they can to avoid it (which of course will make it even worse).
A healthy system would have appropriate taxes on wealthy companies, strong unions (that doesn't mean radical left who ended up destroying the unions), and antitrust laws would mean that corporate wealth would be more balanced with the working class.....but it's not going to happen because they can bugger off elsewhere.
The rich...and people should always have the ability to become rich need a symbiotic relationship with the working class similar to how officers would charge out of the trenches along with their men. When greed and the political classes allow that to change (as they have) then it's a spiral downwards that is dangerous for everybody. In fact I think we have been there for quite a while.
Capitalism is the best system we know....but if crony and not effectively regulated it goes the same way of all systems and feeds on itself until it collapses.
And it won't change until then.
I agree with much of this, and if it wasn't clear, I certainly don't blame pensioners for where we find ourselves.
I do however think it's very unhelpful when people start to make broad accusations of laziness and entitlement against young people, as we've seen in this thread.
I'm in my 30s and I have no problem accepting that young people now have a worse deal than I had - I went to University before the tuition fees tripled and the interest rates on the loans exploded. I was able to rent a flat with my partner for about £1200 a month (the same flat now costs ~£1800), energy bills and council tax has pretty much doubled since then. A food shop is considerably more expensive now, as are pubs and restaurants.
Does that mean I had it easy or that I'm less proud of managing to buy a house? Certainly not.