Ho hum, I like to muse on different topics simultaneously, and every know and then, I manage to join the dots...
Exhibit One
With longer life expectancies, we are going to have to increase the state retirement age. But as the PPI pointed out (in 2003): "The gap in average life expectancy at birth between manual men and non-manual men is 3.5 years; for women it is 2.8 years". So increasing the retirement age by three years would, for example, reduce the amount of pension collected by blue collar workers by a larger fraction that for white collar.
I'm a simplification campaigner, so I believe in having a Citizen's Pension, call it £8,000 a year for sake of argument, with the same retirement age for men and women, but this doesn't address the difference in life-expectancy.
Exhibit Two
The whole question on who should pay university tuition fees - the students themselves (to be repaid with an ugly mixture of interest and higher tax rates) or the taxpayer in general (education is a merit good, borderline public good)?
It appears that universities operating in a free market would charge around £8,000 a year, i.e. that's the price they can charge and the price which covers their running costs per student.
Exhibit Three
Who should pay for student's living costs - the students themselves (again, via stupid loans collected by charging them a higher tax rate as above) or the taxpayer generally?
Again, as a simplification campaigner, I believe in scrapping all these separate benefits, like unemployment benefit, incapacity benefit, New Enterprise Allowance, statutory maternity pay, tax credits, even the tax-free personal allowance and replacing the whole lot with a Citizen's Income, which for working age people would be £4,000 a year for sake of argument.
Cunning Plan #9,837
How about reducing tuition fees by half, to £12,000 for a three year course, which is a perfectly manageable sum for qualified students to pay off, by working part-time, cadging off their parents, taking out a short term loan from a bank etc, and the taxpayer funding the other half - but as a quid pro quo, people who have enjoyed a university education (whether they benefit from it financially is their problem, not mine) have a retirement age which is three years more than those who haven't?
In other words, they get an extra £4,000 a year from the taxpayer for three years when they are young (towards their tuition fees), but when they are old, they can't shift from Citizen's Income of £4,000 a year to £8,000 a year until three years later, so they lose the same amount later on?
This is the sort of thing you can apply retrospectively, i.e. the government could merrily announce that the retirement age is to be increased to 66 by 2016. After that, they could announce that the retirement age for people who studied at the taxpayer's expense (i.e. before 1998) are going to have a retirement age of 67,68, 69 and so on, but non-students can stick with a retirement age of 66 for a much longer period.
At first, this will only affect a few people, because decades ago, only a tenth of people went to university, so the overall effect will not be very dramatic.
Disclaimer: yes I did go to university, I've got two degrees, I contributed towards my fees (long story) and I didn't get a student grant but it was still clearly being subsidised, so if they slap me with an extra three years before I can claim my pension, I'd be willing to accept that as some sort of rough justice - all I'd be losing is £12,000 difference between CP and CI (which is a small fraction of the extra I've earned because of having been to university).
Dear DVSA
1 hour ago
24 comments:
"people who studied at the taxpayer's expense (i.e. before 1998)": oi! The taxpayer in question was my father, who once told me "I've paid a lot of income tax and the only thing I've ever had back for it was part of my childrens'education". So you can include me out.
Try again: "children's education".
D, but millions of other taxpayers chipped in for your education, not just your Dad, and he would have had to pay that extra tax anyway, whether you studied or not.
Further, the children of a lot of those millions of taxpayers who paid for your higher education didn't have children who went to uni for free, and it is these children who would now, in turn, benefit slightly at your expense (to the tune of £12,000 each).
"citizen's pension £8000", you've got a big shock coming, unless of course you're one of the rich elite that wish to confiscate the legally owned property of the less well off.
Yours
Fuckov.
Comrade Fuckov, I'm not sure what system you run over in the Soviet Republic of Fuckov, but here in the free West, Welfare Minister Ian Duncan Smith has proposed a Citizen's Pension of £140 per pensioner per week plus indexation, so let's call that £8,000 a year in round figures.
Or half a million Roubles or whatever currency you use in your country. And if you regard this as theft by the workers who must be enslaved and crushed by good apparatschiks like you then I trust you won't be claiming it yourself?
Just wondering if your citizen's income is actually for citizens, would you pay it to citizens abroad? They could well be paying lots of LVT, how about foreigners who own land? Do their children get subsidised education?
What would your rules for "Home" students be? Currently you or your parents need to be settled in the UK (whether citizen or not) for the 3 years preceding enrolment, and if you're abroad you need to prove that it's temporary or that you maintained a link to the UK while being resident abroad. For EEA-resident students, they need to show a connection with their EEA country (which includes British citizens in France for example).
Personally I think parents should pay for their children's education, which they could afford if they were taxed less and knew they needed to save up from the moment of birth. There can be scholarships for poor kids or those without parents, and of course students who have their own money can pay for it themselves.
Are you discounting the inflation as part of the social good as well? £12000 from 18 to 66 becomes about £31000 if you use the BOE's target rate of 2% (don't know how LVT would affect inflation, but at least house prices wouldn't count). Would you not rather have richer students just pay the full price and get their full pension? At least in this system you can't run away to another country, which is another plus point for LVT too.
Just to add the relevance of the EEA - British students can go to Germany or the Netherlands and pay nothing or something like 100 euros for university. I am told that HMG reimburses the EEA countries for these students, similar to how the NHS pays the French healthcare system for French citizens resident in the UK. Though if this is true, the EEA countries would be reimbursing HMG much more, since the net flow of European students tends to be into the UK.
Skid, those are good questions, if in doubt apply commonsense, for example: "Are you discounting the inflation as part of the social good as well? £12000 from 18 to 66 becomes about £31000 if you use the BOE's target rate of 2%."
Clearly, if the govt pays £4,000 in tuition fees for you this year, by the time you retire, assuming inflation of 2%, the difference between CP and CI will be about £10,000, that's how it cancels itself out.
"Personally I think parents should pay for their children's education, which they could afford if they were taxed less and knew they needed to save up from the moment of birth. There can be scholarships for poor kids or those without parents"
I have to agree with this. There is no point in thick/lazy kids going to university at the taxpayer's expense and wasting everyone's time and money. If they or their parents want to pay for them to do this, fine. Bright, hardworking kids with poor or terminally mean parents would still be able to afford to go to university. Better still if scholarships were only available for certain subjects and not for (insert your favourite junk degree here).
B, "scholarships for poor kids" sounds lovely, but this is means-testing, isn't it? Where do you draw the line? Household income £25,000, maybe? £50,000? Do you adjust it for number of siblings? And means testing is just taxation in disguise, i.e. higher earning parents lose out on something simply because they are higher earners.
For sure, there are plenty of people who go to uni and this is of no particular benefit to the taxpayer or the economy, but if you have to tick a box saying "I agree that I won't be able to draw my retirement pension until three years later" then it will focus people's attention a bit, and, as I said, students would still have to pay half the tuition fees (total £12,000) and there is also the loss of earnings for three years etc.
The point is also that, by this circuitous route, blue collar workers get to claim state pension three years earlier*, which neither D, S nor you appear to think important (I think it is).
* There will be white collar workers who didn't study, they get to win out on both sides of the equation, good for them.
"the minister said"
Please tell me that you are not THAT thick.
Fuckov
Comrade F, do you actually have a point to make?
The fees in a free system are around £8000 per student per year. The State takes around that amount from mum and dad's wages in income tax. So, given that the State takes my boy's tuition fees to waste on Nigerian wind-farms, warfare and bank bailouts I would suggest that the student has no choice but to pay for his degree himself. Should 15 years of state education somehow produce a student who can actually read and write, then the student could get their prospective employer to sponsor their degree. Other than that, working his way through college or borrowing the money seems to be the only option.
R: " given that the State takes my boy's tuition fees to waste on Nigerian wind-farms, warfare and bank bailouts"
No that's not a given.
Whatever we do with uni funding and pensions, wasting money on Nigerian wind farms is wasting money, ought to be stopped anyway, and has absolutely nothing to do with the topic in hand.
Well, it does in a way because university education - along with everything else - would be more affordable without the State helping itself to mum and dad's paypacket. Shortage of money is the fundamental problem, and if the cause of this shortage isn't the State then what is it?
R, look, waste is waste. That has nothing to do with levelling playing field between students and blue collar.
If we put every discussion about every single topic on hold, pending the government cutting off funding for Nigerian wind farms, then we won't get much of a discussion going, or else we end up like the Daily Mail where the solution to absolutely every problem is either "Expel all the immigrants" or "Scrap the welfare state".
" "scholarships for poor kids" sounds lovely, but this is means-testing, isn't it? Where do you draw the line?"
They had all this worked out pretty well in the days of student grants. Kids with poor parents and/or many siblings got grants, kids with rich parents didn't.
"but if you have to tick a box saying "I agree that I won't be able to draw my retirement pension until three years later" then it will focus people's attention a bit,"
You're having a grin, aren't you? How many teenagers can even conceive of themseves at retirement age, let alone make a financial decision based on what is going to happen in that dim and distant future?
This is silly.
No government in a democratic system can possibly promise what will happen in 40 odd years.
B, no I'm not having a grin.
Quite clearly, some will make the wrong decision, and not go when they would have been better off going, or go when they would have been better off not going, but that's NOT MY PROBLEM is it?
In the former case, that is their loss (unfortunately) but it costs me nothing, and in the latter case they end up paying for it.
Anon, no it can't, but it can say what will happen in the next couple of years, can't it?
The current lot have just introduced a system whereby tuition fee loans that are not fully repaid in thirty years will be written off, that's far more fanciful than my proposal that blue collar workers get an earlier retirement age starting NOW.
"blue collar workers get an earlier retirement age starting NOW"
I forsee much income for lawyers in defining what is and isn't a "blue-collar worker". As you said above, where do you draw the line?
B, where do I draw the line?
That's the easy bit - did you study past the age of 18 at taxpayer's expense? Yes or no? For sure, some people will lie about it, but then they have to explain away why their Nat Insurance contributions record doesn't start properly until they were 21 or 22.
No, I meant where do you draw the line betwen blue and white-collar workers?
B, I don't draw a line between blue and white collar, I draw a line between "people who have studied at taxpayers' expense" and "those who haven't".
By and large, those categories overlap with "white" and "blue" (that deals with issue 1) and in exchange for being subsidised when you're young and at Uni, you get your pension later (that deals with issue 2).
It wouldn't matter if absolutely everybody were a white collar worker, we can still sub-divide into "those who've studied at taxpayers' expense" and "those who haven't".
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