Another item for the coalition's to-do list: intergenerational unfairness 

Rhoda Klapp

Special pleading BS alert!

Yam Yam

Apropos, Gordon Brown's parting shot in this war was to grant every pensioner in Britain a free bus pass with only the vaguest of notions of how local authorities might adequately finance this freebie.

PayDirt

RK you are so wrong. The Tories are deadmeat in coming years as old diehards well die and the next crop of voters comes of age, I am afraid is already too late.

2trueblue

There are lots of holes in the scenario above. A now 62yrs. and think that you must be old enough to remember how little we started with. Our generation had no access to easy borrowing, so we lived in very crappy students accommodation, did not have the latest gear, gadgets, central heating in our flats/rooms. The list of things that we did not have is endless.

Once we had saved and got a house, had our children and did our best for them. We hoped that we instilled in them the ability to see that things were for the long term and gave them aspirations to carry them forward. We just got on with it.I remember interest rates on our mortgage sitting at 15%.

By comparison we were not pampered, driven around, entertained and given such free rein. That is why we do have not massive debts and why we appear to be better off than our children were at that stage. We did not expect great holidays unless we had saved for them. We saved for the things we thought important. Our aspirations were long term, our commitments were long term and we just got on with it.
We still get on with it, do the best for ourselves, our families, friends and our communities. Our children will and do actually do the same. It is the best legacy we give to our children, shame that some only think it is about the money.

The age group you speak of are of Liebores reign and interesting that the legacy Liebore left is just that, built on lies, and not investing for tomorrow. They debased everything that was good in the name of helping people in exchange for their aspirations. They robbed those in most need of the one thing that makes the difference, aspirations.
Indulging your self with the illusion that it is all someone elses fault is not what helps people.

R

I was born in 1978 and, despite having a good job etc, have absolutely no expectation of a long retirement, or of receiving any economically meaningful contribution to my retirement from the state, or of various other things that the previous generation took for granted, so I get this issue.

But it’s deluded to think that any government can do anything about it – it’s a simple matter of demographics and economics and the damage is done.

Perhaps the anomaly is not the condition of the young now, but the extraordinary good fortune of the postwar generation. After all, their parents didn’t have it easy at all (two world wars, the depression etc) and earlier still the world was a very different place, and far tougher. One lucky generation cashed in the extraordinary efforts of their parents and squandered their children’s inheritance; of course they haven’t finished yet but it’s too late to stop them – the only way to do that would be a mass, organised default of pension obligations, which is politically unimaginable.

The things that the postwar generation have bestowed upon themselves (vast unearned wealth through house price appreciation, a long period of idleness at the end the of their lives etc) simply have not been, and cannot be, the lot of most people at most times in history, because they’re obviously unaffordable.

Rhoda Klapp

PayDirt, right-wingers are not born, they mature. This generation will be mugged by reality soon enough. The Gods of the Copybook Headings will not spare them.

It is not unnatural for someone who pays little in the way of tax to like the idea of the state spending money on them. They care little of where it comes from. But they get the idea, by and by.

Simon Stephenson

With respect, I think you are seeking to portray a difficulty for which there is a painless solution. Modern politics being what they are, there isn't a painless solution. In broad terms, it's a zero-sum game, in which the only way the less-fortunate can have more is for the more-fortunate to have less.

However, there is a more attractive way out, but this depends upon us recognising that too much of the world's enterprise and ingenuity is directed at acquiring ownership of existing wealth, and too little at creating more of it. The longer we continue with the lazy assumption of "making money equals creating wealth", the longer it will be before we can rediscover the delight of human creativity.

John Kay wrote an excellent column about this:-

http://www.johnkay.com/2010/08/18/robber-barons-of-the-rhine

Nicholas

Eh? Most young people these days are parent mollycoddled and self-absorbed to the point where demonstrative public hugging of their friends is much more important than family ties. They are also terminally ignorant of our history and of the values that sustained the nation throughout its years of adversity. Duty, honour, stiff upper lip, quiet courage and the joy of dry humour and understatement. Gap years, gadgets and clubbing - all non-existent in my day. Sitting in dreary pubs sharing a pint of cider and pork scratchings was about it as previous Labour governments pursued their long term project of ruining the country.

I've nothing against modern yoof. I feel sorry for the feminised girly-men being churned out by the Mumsnet generation of gobby, opinionated and over-sexed women who want it all. And I feel nothing but pity for the over-ambitious, ego-driven but brain-dead thirty-somethings who seem to run everything (and very badly too). But don't try to pretend that an older generation benefitted at a younger generation's expense. There is enough ageism between generations in this shithole as it is.

Prodicus

Don't you dare blame baby-boomer me - I voted Tory. It is not the modest self-interest of the (majority) earning classes, now ageing, which put us where we are.

Every one of these complaints can be laid at Labour's door and those of their Fabian (and worse) cheerleaders and brainwashers in Labour-funded think-tanks and the 'education' establishment - and their USA equivalents. And of course ruthless, cynical Socialists in government who ALWAYS create bubbles and massive debt spirals (under a ‘caring/fairness’ smokescreen) to make it impossible for their political enemies to govern by other philosophies, without bloodshed. The evidence is on our streets right now, exactly as predicted.

It's Labour and its friends who did and still do the damage. Then they produce reports like this which cast the blame on their political enemies: the producing/earning/saving/self-supporting classes who typically vote against them and will not bend the knee. Soviet methods, tried and trusted.
Age/generation has Rockall to do with the state the young are in. And they're *still* Labour leaning. A 40 per cent Labour vote? Incredible – until you remember the size of Labour’s client vote, bought by taxing productive but politically naïve and narcoleptic citizens. Gramsci was right. Unseen revolution by stealth through the key institutions is extremely effective.

So naff off with blaming my 'generation'. You're making me angry. The blame for the disaster of our infantilised and impoverished society belongs wholly to Socialism and its evil philosophers.

http://prodicus.blogspot.com/2010/12/angry-baby-boomer-to-students.html

Simon Stephenson

2trueblue : 10.20am

"By comparison we were not pampered, driven around, entertained and given such free rein ... We did not expect great holidays unless we had saved for them. We saved for the things we thought important. Our aspirations were long term, our commitments were long term and we just got on with it."

Yes, but then the marketing men got to work, and started the 24/7 programme of convincing people that their own minds were very second-rate at identifying the sources of their personal happiness, and that it was a quantum leap forward for mankind to let the promoters decide for them. Being in the herd must lead to a happier life than anything that can be achieved outside it.

Aldous Huxley foresaw all this in 1958, when he wrote Brave New World Revisited. Here's an extract from Chapter 6, entitled "The Arts of Selling":-

"But unfortunately propaganda in the Western democracies, above all in America, has two faces and a divided personality. In charge of the editorial department there is often a democratic Dr. Jekyll -- a propagandist who would be very happy to prove that John Dewey had been right about the abil­ity of human nature to respond to truth and reason. But this worthy man controls only a part of the machin­ery of mass communication. In charge of advertising we find an anti-democratic, because anti-rational, Mr. Hyde -- or rather a Dr. Hyde, for Hyde is now a Ph.D. in psychology and has a master's degree as well in the social sciences. This Dr. Hyde would be very unhappy indeed if everybody always lived up to John Dewey's faith in human nature. Truth and reason are Jekyll's affair, not his. Hyde is a motivation analyst, and his business is to study human weaknesses and failings, to investigate those unconscious desires and fears by which so much of men's conscious thinking and overt doing is determined. And he does this, not in the spirit of the moralist who would like to make people better, or of the physician who would like to improve their health, but simply in order to find out the best way to take advantage of their ignorance and to expolit their irrationality for the pecuniary benefit of his em­ployers. But after all, it may be argued, "capitalism is dead, consumerism is king" -- and consumerism re­quires the services of expert salesmen versed in all the arts (including the more insidious arts) of persuasion. Under a free enterprise system commercial propa­ganda by any and every means is absolutely indis­pensable. But the indispensable is not necessarily the desirable. What is demonstrably good in the sphere of economics may be far from good for men and women as voters or even as human beings. An earlier, more moralistic generation would have been profoundly shocked by the bland cynicism of the motivation ana­lysts."

PayDirt

RK: if at age 20 you were saddled with 40K debt I suspect you’d be thinking of options (a) stick at £20999 pa salary for ever (b) do not declare all income (c) move abroad. All of which are bad options, therefore you would tend to vote against the Ruling Classes who are perceived of as being responsible. Of course maybe lots will actually quite like to move abroad. This stupid get now and pay later is nevernever land and reminds me of similar heavyhanded dictats from above such as the CSA (where are they now?) and Mr Browns micromanaging the tax system. I seem to recall the words of Land of H and G, Britons never will be slaves. Slaves to excessive debt the English students must never be, right? Ask the Irish about debt, it comes home to burn eventually. That eventuality is going to be the unelectability of Camerons party.

Magnolia

I agree with 2trueblue in that I think all the problems for today's young people come from the credit fuelled Labour years which covered up the fact that they couldn't provide rising living standards without borrowing from the future and building up debt.
Back in the seventies state of the art technology were a calculator and a cassette recorder.
Back in the eighties a diagnosis of breast cancer meant mutilating surgery and an early death and middle aged men routinely dropped dead of coronaries.
I lived in student accomodation which was damp and infested with slugs and had beds that routinely gave me backache. I walked everywhere because no one could afford a car or bus fares. I lived off baked beans, current buns and Alpen. A ready meal was fish fingers or 'boil in the bag'.
My own children look at me as though I lived in the dark ages when I tell them these things and I think that in many ways they are far luckier than I was.
Their problems are due to debt alone and dishonest, cowardly and poor quality politicians.

Rhoda Klapp

PayDirt, you only get saddled with the debt if you buy the degree. Now, I don't much like that policy. I do not see how the student is protected from buying a bad degree. He can't get his money back. He can't take his custom elsewhere. And worst of all this policy was voted for by a bunch of scumbag MPs (of all parties, either now or at the £3000pa stage) almost none of whom paid to get a degree. I would hope that the youth will not buy the degree until the system is fixed. I would hope that those of us who are or might be employers will value a modern degree as it should be valued and hire 18-year-olds out of sixth form, rather than graduates where appropriate. British, indeed English 18-year-old preferably. but enough of that, what we really really need is a little consistency of policy. If you want my kids to pay for education I could have had for nothing, give us a bit of warning and a tax break to save for it, don't just change the rules willy-nilly. If you want me to save for a pension, give me a bloody chance (a couple of times in my life I've had cash I wasn't allowed to put into a pension because of annual limits, mostly gone now) and free me from the annuity fiddle. Away with arbitrary rules imposed without time to prepare. away with constant fiddling around the edges instead of facing problems head-on.

How about vouchers for BSc if you are good enough, BAs pay if they think it's worth it?

libertarian

What a complete load of bollocks. Admittedly I only read the open few sentences, but anyone who thinks that the youth of the 50's 60's and 70's had an easier life than those of the 80's and 90's and 2000's is living in a deluded dream world.

Fergus Pickering

well, I don't want to go on about it but I have to say I think modern young people are a BLOODY sight better off than we were in the fifties and sixties. Try reading Kingsley Amis's 'That Uncertain Feeling' and you will see what I mean. I drove my first car when I was thirty-nine and went on my first foreign holiday when I was over forty (bloody disaster that was - never holiday in Normandy; it rains all the time and the natives are a surly lot. Certainly I drank beer and smoked cigarettes but they were cheap in those days. As for yer ackshul DRUGS - couldn't afford them, mate. So keep your hands off my bus pass.

Aye lad

and I lived in 'ole in t'road...

Magnolia

Perhaps I had too many current buns and should have had more currant buns instead.

Ian Walker

There's one fly in the ointment. The talented kids will go elsewhere. So there'll be a island in the north sea filled entirely with grumbling baby-boomers and uneducated scroungers scrambling for a reality TV ticket out.

A socialist paradise, in other words.

yank

My mother patched the knees of my school pants. I doubt I ever saw the inside of a restaurant until I was in my teens. There was no such a thing as air conditioning.

The problem today is that we have forgotten the austerity of our youth, and have participated in building a society that lives off credit, and presumes this to be a healthy thing. And we've sent that message on up to the politicos and Wall Street types, who give it to us... and how... and find a little skim for themselves of course. The trough is long, and growing longer.

Give the kids a hat tip today and in the streets the other day, as they are the canary in the coal mine. They know something's amiss, even though they're too dumb to really know it. So do we know it, but we hurry along and refuse to address our fiscal madness. Or, we address it with more and continued spending, and the drip*drip*drip of fees and taxes blanketed upon us, growth killing burdens that only serve to enable the current unsustainable path.

Some really tough, fundamental decisions must be made to help the young, and they're too stupid to know what those are, but we the older aren't making them.

Cynic

I don't know about the IPOD generation, but I think they are an IWIN generation - I Want It Now - and never mind waiting and saving up for it. I was born just after the war; there was still rationing and bombsites hadn't been filled in. Hardly anybody had a car and all the gadgets and gizmos which today's generation think are essential to life were but a gleam in their creator's eye. We lived in a rural area and some of my parents' friends didn't have electricity, running water or inside lavatories. What I did have, compared with today's generation, however, was two parents (one of each) in a stable married relationship and an excellent education in a State grammar school. In my class of 32 nobody came from a single parent family and only a few were what would be described as "middle class". It is not my generation that is at fault, but Labour's attempts at social engineering.

Verity

"Intergenerational unfairness". Dear God! Is there nothing the febrile Shameron can keep his weird, long, febrile fingers off? His control freakery alarms and amuses. As in his having a personal vanity photographer follow him around. And a personal video-ist. Paid for by funds donated to the Party by rank and file Conservative Party members, not out of his own £36m.

Boudicca

Well, I shall be downsizing and moving to a less expensive area in a few years - when my sons have finished uni and I am approaching retirement. I shall then give them a substantial advance on their inheritance so they can get on the housing ladder and also to keep the money well away from whichever thieving Chancellor happens to be in Office when I eventually pop my clogs.

The inter-generational unfairness certainly exists but it is up to the baby-boomer generation (of which I am a later member) to ensure that their wealth trickles down to their children, whilst at the same time avoiding IT.

Bernie Gudgeon

I’m sure those representative baby boomers Dalglish and Keegan would have loved to have had the opportunity to earn the same wages as Tevez and Rooney.

Mongoose

The average price for a flat where I grew up is £180k. That is more than 7 times my salary. The largest mortgage I could take out is £125k with £25k deposit. That is 18 months net salary.

Consider my father managed to buy a house with a mortgage of 3x his modest salary back in the 80s, on a single income, and raise two children, with a wife that stayed at home.

House price inflation YoY for the past 10 years where I live has run at over 10%. A lot of home owners have got very rich without creating a penny of extra wealth. That is massive transfer of wealth from home-buyers to home-owners.

What is there for the young to aspire to? Home ownership for the lucky couples with parents that can help them out. How can one afford a family when both parents will have to work to pay the mortgage?

No one disputes that many luxury items are massively more affordable now than they were 30 years ago. But the normal aspirations of growing up, getting married, buying a home, having children and then retiring just seem completely impossible in this country. The baby boomers have squandered a massive demographic advantage by not saving for their retirement. Transferring wealth from the young via bricks and mortar and higher taxes to make up for this lack of foresight is immoral. It seems that we're all in it together except for the baby boomers.

Rhoda Klapp

"have got very rich without creating a penny of extra wealth"

Just what do you think wealth is? Why not rent if you feel this way, if you can't get a house, but feel house ownership is immoral, where is your problem?

How lucky I feel as a boomer to have had everything on a plate. 43% marginal tax on £8 a week in my first proper pay packet? Lucky. Have to save with a building society for two years before you could ask for a mortgage? Fortuitous. I can't be bothered to list the rest, suffice it to say it has never been easy for most of us, it still isn't, but in different ways. Generational envy is BS, based on mutual ignorance.

Mongoose

Rhoda Klapp, I already pay a marginal rate of 40% tax on every additional penny I earn when you factor in NI, income tax and student loan repayments. And I earn a median salary. Are you saying that I can save £25k in two years? What planet are you living on? That is two years with no expenditure. Unfortunately, I need to eat and sleep and travel to work, so if I buy no clothes and spend none of my income on anything else, and never service my car or save for a new one for when it breaks, I can save around £500 a month. That means I only need to save for 50 years to get a £25k deposit together. Perhaps if I invest it, I can get 7.5% return from the FTSE over several years. But that ain't 10% is it?

Wealth isn't created by watching more money chasing the same pile of bricks. The only value you create in your house is if you insulate it or do up the kitchen. Otherwise, that value just comes from a bubble. You haven't invested in the next Google. You haven't earned that from making an industrial process more efficient. You've just sat there and voted for fewer houses to be created to drive up the value of your house.

I owe the value of a deposit to the SLC. Pity the students that will soon owe twice that. Certainly, I agree with the principle of student loans. Those that benefit from it should pay for it. But baby boomers should not abuse their demographic advantage to screw the rest of us.

Simon Stephenson

Rhoda Klapp : 9.56am

I'm in agreement with you about many things, but in this case I think Mongoose has a point. What we have with house prices in this country is a market that fails, because it's not allowed to operate. House prices are maintained at far above economic value by an artificially created shortage of development land and massively over-complicated processes covering transfer of ownership. Over the years, the gap between price and economic value has been deliberately expanded by government in order to pamper certain high-population interest groups, at the expense of creating an unnecessary problem for someone else to have to sort out in the future.

This, in a nutshell, is what the marketing age is all about - create a time-separation between benefit and cost, keep shoving the cost into the future, and then use as much optimism as possible to discount the future cost down to nothing.

Simon Stephenson

Mongoose : 11.11am

You may wish to revisit your savings calculations.

Mongoose

Correction: I mean 50 months. The reality is that I only save £200-300 a month on average. A 100 months is not insignificant, particularly if the target keeps moving.

Rhoda Klapp

Mongoose, I have a 25-y-o son in the same boat as you. Degree and debt-wise anyway, he hasn't got a proper job though. Of his contemporaries in our circle, the only two who have their own houses did not go to university. Do you have a similar cohort? How are they all doing? Buying a house on a single income hasn't been realistically possible for years. And yet I have two brats. And you unfortunately have no diea of the difference between money and wealth. Wealth creation is not real. Some things can be sold for more than they cost, sometimes. There is no intrinsic value in anything other than what you can get someone to pay. I have never voted for fewer houses, and I think you will find that option was never offered anyhow. Politicians do not stand for fewer houses. They may implement policies in the planning arena which work out that way, but I wouldn't vote for those policies, I think anyone should be allowed to build what they like, anywhere. Even if it inconveniences me. But that's the price of being a little libertarian.

Anyway, I expect that society will not be prepared to continue to pay my generation all those generous benefits for long. As soon as we are useless as the main providers of government revenue, we'll be cast aside. I blame Lloyd George. And Mr Beveridge. And Bevan or was it Bevin. But I do not see an end to politicians offering unfunded benefits to gain a short-tem advantage.

yank

Don't know how it is there, but the house me and the bank share ownership of here is a significant burden.

Tab it all up, all of it, including the hours of time and materials I put into it, and it's a poor investment. Now, what if I rented? Rent year by year, keep our possessions down to a minimum, move periodically as desired, even just a few blocks? Sounds pretty good, eh?

With kids, sure, stability is important. But home ownership, or "home undership" as it's sometimes referenced, isn't always desirable, and I see no reason to make it one of society's benchmarks as we've all done.

Grow the economy, and grow incomes. They'll sort out the rest.