If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
On consanguinity, while there is an increased risk of congenital anomalies (from memory ~2x that of unrelated couples) it's only comparable to the risk from being an older mother. I forget the cross-over point (10 years older rings a bell) but an e.g. young, related, imported bride might not have greater risk of a child with congenital anomaly compared to an older, unrelated British mother.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU," he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
You seem to be a man who strains to be tolerant then outs himself with a statement like this. You are just as bad and prejudiced as those you criticise.
Manchester police re-investigating Angela Rayner council house claims
Labour’s deputy leader is accused of breaking electoral law for allegedly giving false information relating to capital gains tax on her former Stockport house
Police are reassessing claims that Angela Rayner broke electoral law after receiving a complaint from the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party.
James Daly, the MP for Bury North, said Greater Manchester police had failed to properly investigate claims the Labour deputy leader may have broken the law in the early 2010s when she lived between two council houses in Stockport.
On Monday the police confirmed that a detective chief inspector had been assigned to reconsider the case, putting pressure on Rayner again, days after she launched a fightback in the media.
Obviously giving false information re CGT would be a breach of tax law but I'm not clear why it would be a breach of electoral law?
False info on the electoral roll/where registered to vote is a crime punishable by up to 6 months or unlimited fine. It's that the allegation relates to
Edit - I believe they are angling that if no crime occured re addresses registered to vote etc then the tax implications of the sales don't add up. Its a 'one or the other is wrong' accusation
That is nonsense. You can be registered to vote at multiple addresses.
Someone should ask GMP to investige Mr Daly for wasting police time.
Providing false information about where you live and are registered to vote to the EC is a criminal offence, that isn't nonsense. I'm not accusing her, just saying what they are being asked to look at
Unless the process has changed since I was an agent in 2015 candidates do not provide information to the electoral commission - everything goes to local returning officers and they check that the candidate's address on their nomination form corresponds to their electoral register record when papers are submitted. There's no scope for giving a false address, and nor is there any reason for a candidate to do so. At one time candidates' full addresses were printed on ballot papers but this is no longer a requirement, though candidates can still opt for it if they wish.
The honourable member for Shipley gave an address in Cheshire.
Perfectly legal - as long as you have an address in the UK (and meet citizenship requirements etc) you can stand in any constituency.
There are occasional stories of local Coucnillors who have migrated to various Timbuctoos and keep their positions for months or years.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
Do you know that Hispanic Americans have greater life expectancy than white ones? This is despite being in lower SE groups on average. Asian Americans live even longer still.
Isn't that coz of opioids and Tranq, etc, in America? These drugs overwhelmingly impacted poor white America, first. Little towns in West Virgnia and the like: sending life expectancy tumbling
However I believe the drug problem is now hitting other ethnicities, too, so we may see similar problems with Hispanics
The Asian American longevity advantage is not at all surprising - if you mean East Asians. They eat very healthily, they have high IQs, they don't suffer obesity
A mix of reasons, but on current data Hispanic Americans are healthier, so you were wrong.
Hispanic Americans are not a uniform group and many millions of them are undocumented, so you have to take statistics like that with a pinch of salt.
Also, even if you focus on Hispanics, @foxy is wrong
The Hispanic nations that send the most migrants to the USA are
Mexico: life expectancy 70 El Salvador: life expectancy 71 Guatemala: life expectancy 72 Venezuela: life expectancy 71
The USA has a life expectancy of 77, so if it imports people from these countries then its life expectancy will go down
Hang on.
That's not necessarily true at all.
Maybe life expectancy in those countries is low because there is next to no provision for health care for old people. Maybe it is low because it is the fittest, healthiest, people who emigrate?
You need to look at the life expectancy for someone who comes to a country, not to look at the life expectancy of the people left behind
For example, Singapore has absolutely masses of poor immigrants from SE Asia and one of the highest life expectancies in the world
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
The boomer generation or any other generation did not get much say in the matter. Well, a few dozen or even a couple of hundred might have been elected to parliament but the rest of the millions were not asked.
As for why things are necessary, well, even assuming they are, probably because in the 1980s oil and privatisation revenues were spaffed on keeping millions on the dole instead of investing.
They were asked every four to five years on average their priorities.
They should take full responsibility of their choices.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
On consanguinity, while there is an increased risk of congenital anomalies (from memory ~2x that of unrelated couples) it's only comparable to the risk from being an older mother. I forget the cross-over point (10 years older rings a bell) but an e.g. young, related, imported bride might not have greater risk of a child with congenital anomaly compared to an older, unrelated British mother.
We should make first cousin marriage illegal. Several countries already do - eg China, Taiwan, Korea, much of the USA - and they avoid all the attendant problems
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
Its quite impressive you talk like that Leon as living where you do in central london it would be much easier to be a woke leftie like Kinabalu denying theres any problem whilst living in an elite ghetto like Hampstead.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
Do you know that Hispanic Americans have greater life expectancy than white ones? This is despite being in lower SE groups on average. Asian Americans live even longer still.
Isn't that coz of opioids and Tranq, etc, in America? These drugs overwhelmingly impacted poor white America, first. Little towns in West Virgnia and the like: sending life expectancy tumbling
However I believe the drug problem is now hitting other ethnicities, too, so we may see similar problems with Hispanics
The Asian American longevity advantage is not at all surprising - if you mean East Asians. They eat very healthily, they have high IQs, they don't suffer obesity
A mix of reasons, but on current data Hispanic Americans are healthier, so you were wrong.
Hispanic Americans are not a uniform group and many millions of them are undocumented, so you have to take statistics like that with a pinch of salt.
Also, even if you focus on Hispanics, @foxy is wrong
The Hispanic nations that send the most migrants to the USA are
Mexico: life expectancy 70 El Salvador: life expectancy 71 Guatemala: life expectancy 72 Venezuela: life expectancy 71
The USA has a life expectancy of 77, so if it imports people from these countries then its life expectancy will go down
Hang on.
That's not necessarily true at all.
Maybe life expectancy in those countries is low because there is next to no provision for health care for old people. Maybe it is low because it is the fittest, healthiest, people who emigrate?
You need to look at the life expectancy for someone who comes to a country, not to look at the life expectancy of the people left behind
For example, Singapore has absolutely masses of poor immigrants from SE Asia and one of the highest life expectancies in the world
Of course there are variables, but the basic truth is the truth
If you import lots of short people, the average height of a nation will go down
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
Do you know that Hispanic Americans have greater life expectancy than white ones? This is despite being in lower SE groups on average. Asian Americans live even longer still.
Isn't that coz of opioids and Tranq, etc, in America? These drugs overwhelmingly impacted poor white America, first. Little towns in West Virgnia and the like: sending life expectancy tumbling
However I believe the drug problem is now hitting other ethnicities, too, so we may see similar problems with Hispanics
The Asian American longevity advantage is not at all surprising - if you mean East Asians. They eat very healthily, they have high IQs, they don't suffer obesity
A mix of reasons, but on current data Hispanic Americans are healthier, so you were wrong.
Hispanic Americans are not a uniform group and many millions of them are undocumented, so you have to take statistics like that with a pinch of salt.
Also, even if you focus on Hispanics, @foxy is wrong
The Hispanic nations that send the most migrants to the USA are
Mexico: life expectancy 70 El Salvador: life expectancy 71 Guatemala: life expectancy 72 Venezuela: life expectancy 71
The USA has a life expectancy of 77, so if it imports people from these countries then its life expectancy will go down
Hang on.
That's not necessarily true at all.
Maybe life expectancy in those countries is low because there is next to no provision for health care for old people. Maybe it is low because it is the fittest, healthiest, people who emigrate?
You need to look at the life expectancy for someone who comes to a country, not to look at the life expectancy of the people left behind
For example, Singapore has absolutely masses of poor immigrants from SE Asia and one of the highest life expectancies in the world
Of course there are variables, but the basic truth is the truth
If you import lots of short people, the average height of a nation will go down
That's comparing apples with panda bears.
Height doesn't vary much as an adult based upon your choices.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
Do you know that Hispanic Americans have greater life expectancy than white ones? This is despite being in lower SE groups on average. Asian Americans live even longer still.
Isn't that coz of opioids and Tranq, etc, in America? These drugs overwhelmingly impacted poor white America, first. Little towns in West Virgnia and the like: sending life expectancy tumbling
However I believe the drug problem is now hitting other ethnicities, too, so we may see similar problems with Hispanics
The Asian American longevity advantage is not at all surprising - if you mean East Asians. They eat very healthily, they have high IQs, they don't suffer obesity
A mix of reasons, but on current data Hispanic Americans are healthier, so you were wrong.
i never even mentioned Hispanics - you did - so no, I was not "wrong"
The vast majority of immigrants to America are Hispanics.
Actually not true, either, it is absolutely not the vast majority, not any more
"Among new immigrant arrivals, Asians outnumber Hispanics"
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If we don't have large scale immigration we are going to need a lot of retired people to go back into work and we are going to have to develop ways to get the inactive to move to parts of the country where they can become active and afford to live. We are also going to have to close down a lot of universities and somehow get younger people to have more kids. This will all involve a much higher tax burden than the one we have even now. If we just dramatically cut immigration without accepting the pay-offs the consequences will be immensely unpopular very quickly.
RFK Jr.’s VP Pick Calls for Chronic Disease Investigation
Today, @RobertKennedyJr announced entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan as his VP running mate.
She said, “Conditions like autism used to be one in 10,000. Now, here in the state of California, it is one in 22.”
Three things are causing the chronic disease epidemic, Shanahan declared:
1.) “One is the toxic substances in our environment, like endocrine, disrupting chemicals in our food, water, and soil.”
2.) “Second is electromagnetic pollution. You don’t hear politicians talking much about that either.”
3.) The third cause is the cumulative impact of medications and vaccinations received throughout childhood, for which comprehensive safety studies assessing long-term effects are currently lacking.
• “No single safety study can assess the cumulative impact of one prescription on top of another ... We just don’t do that study right now, and we ought to.”
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
Do you know that Hispanic Americans have greater life expectancy than white ones? This is despite being in lower SE groups on average. Asian Americans live even longer still.
Isn't that coz of opioids and Tranq, etc, in America? These drugs overwhelmingly impacted poor white America, first. Little towns in West Virgnia and the like: sending life expectancy tumbling
However I believe the drug problem is now hitting other ethnicities, too, so we may see similar problems with Hispanics
The Asian American longevity advantage is not at all surprising - if you mean East Asians. They eat very healthily, they have high IQs, they don't suffer obesity
A mix of reasons, but on current data Hispanic Americans are healthier, so you were wrong.
i never even mentioned Hispanics - you did - so no, I was not "wrong"
The vast majority of immigrants to America are Hispanics.
Actually not true, either, it is absolutely not the vast majority, not any more
"Among new immigrant arrivals, Asians outnumber Hispanics"
Those are 2020 figures, since then Hispanics are back as the majority, particularly from central and Southern America.
The largest group of foreign born in the USA are Hispanic, particularly Mexican.
In any case, Asians too live longer than white Americans.
Your assertion that immigration is reducing American life expectancy is simply wrong. If anything it is improving it.
I appreciate this doesn't fit neatly in your alt.right rabbit hole, but thems the facts.
No, you said this:
"The vast majority of immigrants to America are Hispanics"
And that is simply false; at present it is a roughly equal mix of Asians and Hispanics as the two main groups, with others following. Haitians are now a significant element, more Africans are coming, and so on
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
On consanguinity, while there is an increased risk of congenital anomalies (from memory ~2x that of unrelated couples) it's only comparable to the risk from being an older mother. I forget the cross-over point (10 years older rings a bell) but an e.g. young, related, imported bride might not have greater risk of a child with congenital anomaly compared to an older, unrelated British mother.
There is some interesting work on genetic ancestry data that shows that perhaps we have over estimated the risk of inbreeding. In America it seems as if far more are born of incest than are aware of it.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
Do you know that Hispanic Americans have greater life expectancy than white ones? This is despite being in lower SE groups on average. Asian Americans live even longer still.
Isn't that coz of opioids and Tranq, etc, in America? These drugs overwhelmingly impacted poor white America, first. Little towns in West Virgnia and the like: sending life expectancy tumbling
However I believe the drug problem is now hitting other ethnicities, too, so we may see similar problems with Hispanics
The Asian American longevity advantage is not at all surprising - if you mean East Asians. They eat very healthily, they have high IQs, they don't suffer obesity
A mix of reasons, but on current data Hispanic Americans are healthier, so you were wrong.
Hispanic Americans are not a uniform group and many millions of them are undocumented, so you have to take statistics like that with a pinch of salt.
Also, even if you focus on Hispanics, @foxy is wrong
The Hispanic nations that send the most migrants to the USA are
Mexico: life expectancy 70 El Salvador: life expectancy 71 Guatemala: life expectancy 72 Venezuela: life expectancy 71
The USA has a life expectancy of 77, so if it imports people from these countries then its life expectancy will go down
"Life expectancy at birth is largely determined by childhood mortality."
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If we don't have large scale immigration we are going to need a lot of retired people to go back into work and we are going to have to develop ways to get the inactive to move to parts of the country where they can become active and afford to live. We are also going to have to close down a lot of universities and somehow get younger people to have more kids. This will all involve a much higher tax burden than the one we have even now. If we just dramatically cut immigration without accepting the pay-offs the consequences will be immensely unpopular very quickly.
I wouldn't deny any of that. As a nation we have become stupidly reliant on the quick fix of mass immigration. It is not sustainable, per se, and we are now also seeing many of the negative side effects that come with it
Weaning ourselves off this drug will be painful. I don't think Starmer has the cullions to do it. but in the end someone will have to grasp the nettle
Of course, if AI fulfils its huge potential that would help enormously
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
Do you know that Hispanic Americans have greater life expectancy than white ones? This is despite being in lower SE groups on average. Asian Americans live even longer still.
Isn't that coz of opioids and Tranq, etc, in America? These drugs overwhelmingly impacted poor white America, first. Little towns in West Virgnia and the like: sending life expectancy tumbling
However I believe the drug problem is now hitting other ethnicities, too, so we may see similar problems with Hispanics
The Asian American longevity advantage is not at all surprising - if you mean East Asians. They eat very healthily, they have high IQs, they don't suffer obesity
A mix of reasons, but on current data Hispanic Americans are healthier, so you were wrong.
Hispanic Americans are not a uniform group and many millions of them are undocumented, so you have to take statistics like that with a pinch of salt.
Also, even if you focus on Hispanics, @foxy is wrong
The Hispanic nations that send the most migrants to the USA are
Mexico: life expectancy 70 El Salvador: life expectancy 71 Guatemala: life expectancy 72 Venezuela: life expectancy 71
The USA has a life expectancy of 77, so if it imports people from these countries then its life expectancy will go down
Hang on.
That's not necessarily true at all.
Maybe life expectancy in those countries is low because there is next to no provision for health care for old people. Maybe it is low because it is the fittest, healthiest, people who emigrate?
You need to look at the life expectancy for someone who comes to a country, not to look at the life expectancy of the people left behind
For example, Singapore has absolutely masses of poor immigrants from SE Asia and one of the highest life expectancies in the world
On thread: this just shows the extent to which the mentality of "the government has money and if it doesn't spend it it's because it's being greedy" persists. People don't, inherently, grasp where government money comes from.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If we don't have large scale immigration we are going to need a lot of retired people to go back into work and we are going to have to develop ways to get the inactive to move to parts of the country where they can become active and afford to live. We are also going to have to close down a lot of universities and somehow get younger people to have more kids. This will all involve a much higher tax burden than the one we have even now. If we just dramatically cut immigration without accepting the pay-offs the consequences will be immensely unpopular very quickly.
I wouldn't deny any of that. As a nation we have become stupidly reliant on the quick fix of mass immigration. It is not sustainable, per se, and we are now also seeing many of the negative side effects that come with it
Weaning ourselves off this drug will be painful. I don't think Starmer has the cullions to do it. but in the end someone will have to grasp the nettle
Of course, if AI fulfils its huge potential that would help enormously
People will not accept becoming poorer over a sustained period unless they have no choice. And there is always a choice in a democracy. What you want requires dictatorship. And even then you cannot prevent people living longer unless you introduce euthanasia or force women to have babies unless you legalise rape.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If we don't have large scale immigration we are going to need a lot of retired people to go back into work and we are going to have to develop ways to get the inactive to move to parts of the country where they can become active and afford to live. We are also going to have to close down a lot of universities and somehow get younger people to have more kids. This will all involve a much higher tax burden than the one we have even now. If we just dramatically cut immigration without accepting the pay-offs the consequences will be immensely unpopular very quickly.
There's somethingin that - but 700,000 a year? That can't be the solution.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
Do you know that Hispanic Americans have greater life expectancy than white ones? This is despite being in lower SE groups on average. Asian Americans live even longer still.
Isn't that coz of opioids and Tranq, etc, in America? These drugs overwhelmingly impacted poor white America, first. Little towns in West Virgnia and the like: sending life expectancy tumbling
However I believe the drug problem is now hitting other ethnicities, too, so we may see similar problems with Hispanics
The Asian American longevity advantage is not at all surprising - if you mean East Asians. They eat very healthily, they have high IQs, they don't suffer obesity
A mix of reasons, but on current data Hispanic Americans are healthier, so you were wrong.
Hispanic Americans are not a uniform group and many millions of them are undocumented, so you have to take statistics like that with a pinch of salt.
Also, even if you focus on Hispanics, @foxy is wrong
The Hispanic nations that send the most migrants to the USA are
Mexico: life expectancy 70 El Salvador: life expectancy 71 Guatemala: life expectancy 72 Venezuela: life expectancy 71
The USA has a life expectancy of 77, so if it imports people from these countries then its life expectancy will go down
"Life expectancy at birth is largely determined by childhood mortality."
Use your brain.
It's absolute bollocks
American life expectancy has been in steep decline, not because lots of American babies are dying, but because Americans are taking opioids, becoming obese, getting killed in road accidents, and shooting each other and themselves, and so on. And they are also importing lots of poor people, and poor people die younger
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If we don't have large scale immigration we are going to need a lot of retired people to go back into work and we are going to have to develop ways to get the inactive to move to parts of the country where they can become active and afford to live. We are also going to have to close down a lot of universities and somehow get younger people to have more kids. This will all involve a much higher tax burden than the one we have even now. If we just dramatically cut immigration without accepting the pay-offs the consequences will be immensely unpopular very quickly.
There's somethingin that - but 700,000 a year? That can't be the solution.
I would be very surprised if that number was sustained. It is the product of a lot of things coming together at the same time.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If we don't have large scale immigration we are going to need a lot of retired people to go back into work and we are going to have to develop ways to get the inactive to move to parts of the country where they can become active and afford to live. We are also going to have to close down a lot of universities and somehow get younger people to have more kids. This will all involve a much higher tax burden than the one we have even now. If we just dramatically cut immigration without accepting the pay-offs the consequences will be immensely unpopular very quickly.
There's somethingin that - but 700,000 a year? That can't be the solution.
I would be very surprised if that number was sustained. It is the product of a lot of things coming together at the same time.
That's what I'm telling myself with nursery fees, car service, house insurance, three plumbing jobs and a holiday payment all out of my bank in the first few months of the year.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
Do you know that Hispanic Americans have greater life expectancy than white ones? This is despite being in lower SE groups on average. Asian Americans live even longer still.
Isn't that coz of opioids and Tranq, etc, in America? These drugs overwhelmingly impacted poor white America, first. Little towns in West Virgnia and the like: sending life expectancy tumbling
However I believe the drug problem is now hitting other ethnicities, too, so we may see similar problems with Hispanics
The Asian American longevity advantage is not at all surprising - if you mean East Asians. They eat very healthily, they have high IQs, they don't suffer obesity
A mix of reasons, but on current data Hispanic Americans are healthier, so you were wrong.
Hispanic Americans are not a uniform group and many millions of them are undocumented, so you have to take statistics like that with a pinch of salt.
Also, even if you focus on Hispanics, @foxy is wrong
The Hispanic nations that send the most migrants to the USA are
Mexico: life expectancy 70 El Salvador: life expectancy 71 Guatemala: life expectancy 72 Venezuela: life expectancy 71
The USA has a life expectancy of 77, so if it imports people from these countries then its life expectancy will go down
Only if you also import the Venezuelan health care system.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
On consanguinity, while there is an increased risk of congenital anomalies (from memory ~2x that of unrelated couples) it's only comparable to the risk from being an older mother. I forget the cross-over point (10 years older rings a bell) but an e.g. young, related, imported bride might not have greater risk of a child with congenital anomaly compared to an older, unrelated British mother.
Doctors seek out postings to places like Bradford so that they get the chance to deal with conditions that you would not normally see.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If we don't have large scale immigration we are going to need a lot of retired people to go back into work and we are going to have to develop ways to get the inactive to move to parts of the country where they can become active and afford to live. We are also going to have to close down a lot of universities and somehow get younger people to have more kids. This will all involve a much higher tax burden than the one we have even now. If we just dramatically cut immigration without accepting the pay-offs the consequences will be immensely unpopular very quickly.
I wouldn't deny any of that. As a nation we have become stupidly reliant on the quick fix of mass immigration. It is not sustainable, per se, and we are now also seeing many of the negative side effects that come with it
Weaning ourselves off this drug will be painful. I don't think Starmer has the cullions to do it. but in the end someone will have to grasp the nettle
Of course, if AI fulfils its huge potential that would help enormously
People will not accept becoming poorer over a sustained period unless they have no choice. And there is always a choice in a democracy. What you want requires dictatorship. And even then you cannot prevent people living longer unless you introduce euthanasia or force women to have babies unless you legalise rape.
This is histrionic nonsense
Plenty of societies do fine, economically, without having UK levels of immigration
Manchester police re-investigating Angela Rayner council house claims
Labour’s deputy leader is accused of breaking electoral law for allegedly giving false information relating to capital gains tax on her former Stockport house
Police are reassessing claims that Angela Rayner broke electoral law after receiving a complaint from the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party.
James Daly, the MP for Bury North, said Greater Manchester police had failed to properly investigate claims the Labour deputy leader may have broken the law in the early 2010s when she lived between two council houses in Stockport.
On Monday the police confirmed that a detective chief inspector had been assigned to reconsider the case, putting pressure on Rayner again, days after she launched a fightback in the media.
Obviously giving false information re CGT would be a breach of tax law but I'm not clear why it would be a breach of electoral law?
False info on the electoral roll/where registered to vote is a crime punishable by up to 6 months or unlimited fine. It's that the allegation relates to
Edit - I believe they are angling that if no crime occured re addresses registered to vote etc then the tax implications of the sales don't add up. Its a 'one or the other is wrong' accusation
That is nonsense. You can be registered to vote at multiple addresses.
Someone should ask GMP to investige Mr Daly for wasting police time.
Providing false information about where you live and are registered to vote to the EC is a criminal offence, that isn't nonsense. I'm not accusing her, just saying what they are being asked to look at
Unless the process has changed since I was an agent in 2015 candidates do not provide information to the electoral commission - everything goes to local returning officers and they check that the candidate's address on their nomination form corresponds to their electoral register record when papers are submitted. There's no scope for giving a false address, and nor is there any reason for a candidate to do so. At one time candidates' full addresses were printed on ballot papers but this is no longer a requirement, though candidates can still opt for it if they wish.
The honourable member for Shipley gave an address in Cheshire.
Perfectly legal - as long as you have an address in the UK (and meet citizenship requirements etc) you can stand in any constituency.
There are occasional stories of local Coucnillors who have migrated to various Timbuctoos and keep their positions for months or years.
We had one in Bishop Auckland who lived in the Dominican Republic.
On thread: this just shows the extent to which the mentality of "the government has money and if it doesn't spend it it's because it's being greedy" persists. People don't, inherently, grasp where government money comes from.
Redistribution is popular amongst those who aren't paying for it shock!
I think too that the there are only 7 500 000 people currently paying into private pensions in the UK, with an average contribution of £1600.
This means that the majority are reliant on the State Pension, and even those in schemed it is likely to be the majority of their income in retirement.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
On consanguinity, while there is an increased risk of congenital anomalies (from memory ~2x that of unrelated couples) it's only comparable to the risk from being an older mother. I forget the cross-over point (10 years older rings a bell) but an e.g. young, related, imported bride might not have greater risk of a child with congenital anomaly compared to an older, unrelated British mother.
Doctors seek out postings to places like Bradford so that they get the chance to deal with conditions that you would not normally see.
Interesting that this kind of anti-immigrant stuff seems to get such free rein now.
Another group in which marriages between cousins are quite common is the Jewish community. Do people here generally think that "importing Jews is importing problems", I wonder?
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If we don't have large scale immigration we are going to need a lot of retired people to go back into work and we are going to have to develop ways to get the inactive to move to parts of the country where they can become active and afford to live. We are also going to have to close down a lot of universities and somehow get younger people to have more kids. This will all involve a much higher tax burden than the one we have even now. If we just dramatically cut immigration without accepting the pay-offs the consequences will be immensely unpopular very quickly.
I wouldn't deny any of that. As a nation we have become stupidly reliant on the quick fix of mass immigration. It is not sustainable, per se, and we are now also seeing many of the negative side effects that come with it
Weaning ourselves off this drug will be painful. I don't think Starmer has the cullions to do it. but in the end someone will have to grasp the nettle
Of course, if AI fulfils its huge potential that would help enormously
People will not accept becoming poorer over a sustained period unless they have no choice. And there is always a choice in a democracy. What you want requires dictatorship. And even then you cannot prevent people living longer unless you introduce euthanasia or force women to have babies unless you legalise rape.
What we are seeing is the failure of targetting full employment with an open labour market. We aren't importing so many people because we need them but because the economic consensus of the last 25 years is wrong.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If we don't have large scale immigration we are going to need a lot of retired people to go back into work and we are going to have to develop ways to get the inactive to move to parts of the country where they can become active and afford to live. We are also going to have to close down a lot of universities and somehow get younger people to have more kids. This will all involve a much higher tax burden than the one we have even now. If we just dramatically cut immigration without accepting the pay-offs the consequences will be immensely unpopular very quickly.
I wouldn't deny any of that. As a nation we have become stupidly reliant on the quick fix of mass immigration. It is not sustainable, per se, and we are now also seeing many of the negative side effects that come with it
Weaning ourselves off this drug will be painful. I don't think Starmer has the cullions to do it. but in the end someone will have to grasp the nettle
Of course, if AI fulfils its huge potential that would help enormously
People will not accept becoming poorer over a sustained period unless they have no choice. And there is always a choice in a democracy. What you want requires dictatorship. And even then you cannot prevent people living longer unless you introduce euthanasia or force women to have babies unless you legalise rape.
This is histrionic nonsense
Plenty of societies do fine, economically, without having UK levels of immigration
The ones that never had it in the first place might do. How many have actually succeeded in turning off the taps?
Billions needed for the triple lock, add in many billions for NHS, Education, Defence, Water and Sewage, Social care and someone sometime is going to have to make very unpopular decisions whether it is Starmer or anyone else it has to happen
Obvious targets are wealth taxes, wage restraints, reduction in many areas of public spending or if not can someone indicate what the magic bullet is
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
Do you know that Hispanic Americans have greater life expectancy than white ones? This is despite being in lower SE groups on average. Asian Americans live even longer still.
Isn't that coz of opioids and Tranq, etc, in America? These drugs overwhelmingly impacted poor white America, first. Little towns in West Virgnia and the like: sending life expectancy tumbling
However I believe the drug problem is now hitting other ethnicities, too, so we may see similar problems with Hispanics
The Asian American longevity advantage is not at all surprising - if you mean East Asians. They eat very healthily, they have high IQs, they don't suffer obesity
A mix of reasons, but on current data Hispanic Americans are healthier, so you were wrong.
Hispanic Americans are not a uniform group and many millions of them are undocumented, so you have to take statistics like that with a pinch of salt.
Also, even if you focus on Hispanics, @foxy is wrong
The Hispanic nations that send the most migrants to the USA are
Mexico: life expectancy 70 El Salvador: life expectancy 71 Guatemala: life expectancy 72 Venezuela: life expectancy 71
The USA has a life expectancy of 77, so if it imports people from these countries then its life expectancy will go down
"Life expectancy at birth is largely determined by childhood mortality."
Use your brain.
It's absolute bollocks
American life expectancy has been in steep decline, not because lots of American babies are dying, but because Americans are taking opioids, becoming obese, getting killed in road accidents, and shooting each other and themselves, and so on. And they are also importing lots of poor people, and poor people die younger
Let me spell it out for you, then. You are comparing the life expectancy at birth of separate countries, and assuming that comparison still applies to immigrants into the US from those comparator countries.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
Do you know that Hispanic Americans have greater life expectancy than white ones? This is despite being in lower SE groups on average. Asian Americans live even longer still.
Isn't that coz of opioids and Tranq, etc, in America? These drugs overwhelmingly impacted poor white America, first. Little towns in West Virgnia and the like: sending life expectancy tumbling
However I believe the drug problem is now hitting other ethnicities, too, so we may see similar problems with Hispanics
The Asian American longevity advantage is not at all surprising - if you mean East Asians. They eat very healthily, they have high IQs, they don't suffer obesity
A mix of reasons, but on current data Hispanic Americans are healthier, so you were wrong.
Hispanic Americans are not a uniform group and many millions of them are undocumented, so you have to take statistics like that with a pinch of salt.
Also, even if you focus on Hispanics, @foxy is wrong
The Hispanic nations that send the most migrants to the USA are
Mexico: life expectancy 70 El Salvador: life expectancy 71 Guatemala: life expectancy 72 Venezuela: life expectancy 71
The USA has a life expectancy of 77, so if it imports people from these countries then its life expectancy will go down
"Life expectancy at birth is largely determined by childhood mortality."
Use your brain.
It's absolute bollocks
American life expectancy has been in steep decline, not because lots of American babies are dying, but because Americans are taking opioids, becoming obese, getting killed in road accidents, and shooting each other and themselves, and so on. And they are also importing lots of poor people, and poor people die younger
Let me spell it out for you, then. You are comparing the life expectancy at birth of separate countries, and assuming that comparison still applies to immigrants into the US from those comparator countries.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If we don't have large scale immigration we are going to need a lot of retired people to go back into work and we are going to have to develop ways to get the inactive to move to parts of the country where they can become active and afford to live. We are also going to have to close down a lot of universities and somehow get younger people to have more kids. This will all involve a much higher tax burden than the one we have even now. If we just dramatically cut immigration without accepting the pay-offs the consequences will be immensely unpopular very quickly.
I wouldn't deny any of that. As a nation we have become stupidly reliant on the quick fix of mass immigration. It is not sustainable, per se, and we are now also seeing many of the negative side effects that come with it
Weaning ourselves off this drug will be painful. I don't think Starmer has the cullions to do it. but in the end someone will have to grasp the nettle
Of course, if AI fulfils its huge potential that would help enormously
People will not accept becoming poorer over a sustained period unless they have no choice. And there is always a choice in a democracy. What you want requires dictatorship. And even then you cannot prevent people living longer unless you introduce euthanasia or force women to have babies unless you legalise rape.
What we are seeing is the failure of targetting full employment with an open labour market. We aren't importing so many people because we need them but because the economic consensus of the last 25 years is wrong.
Levels of immigration are higher than they have ever been thanks to decisions specifically taken by the current government. But I agree that longer term we have created a situation where we have failed to invest in public infrastructure and services, so that a lot of jobs have become the preserve of poorly paid immigrants. That is a failure. But who is going to change that? Voters will not tolerate it.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If we don't have large scale immigration we are going to need a lot of retired people to go back into work and we are going to have to develop ways to get the inactive to move to parts of the country where they can become active and afford to live. We are also going to have to close down a lot of universities and somehow get younger people to have more kids. This will all involve a much higher tax burden than the one we have even now. If we just dramatically cut immigration without accepting the pay-offs the consequences will be immensely unpopular very quickly.
I wouldn't deny any of that. As a nation we have become stupidly reliant on the quick fix of mass immigration. It is not sustainable, per se, and we are now also seeing many of the negative side effects that come with it
Weaning ourselves off this drug will be painful. I don't think Starmer has the cullions to do it. but in the end someone will have to grasp the nettle
Of course, if AI fulfils its huge potential that would help enormously
People will not accept becoming poorer over a sustained period unless they have no choice. And there is always a choice in a democracy. What you want requires dictatorship. And even then you cannot prevent people living longer unless you introduce euthanasia or force women to have babies unless you legalise rape.
This is histrionic nonsense
Plenty of societies do fine, economically, without having UK levels of immigration
The ones that never had it in the first place might do. How many have actually succeeded in turning off the taps?
The foreign born population in the USA fell signficantly in the decades leading up to the mid-1960s.
Billions needed for the triple lock, add in many billions for NHS, Education, Defence, Water and Sewage, Social care and someone sometime is going to have to make very unpopular decisions whether it is Starmer or anyone else it has to happen
Obvious targets are wealth taxes, wage restraints, reduction in many areas of public spending or if not can someone indicate what the magic bullet is
Wealth taxes implemented in the most cackhanded way imaginable seems favourite.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
On consanguinity, while there is an increased risk of congenital anomalies (from memory ~2x that of unrelated couples) it's only comparable to the risk from being an older mother. I forget the cross-over point (10 years older rings a bell) but an e.g. young, related, imported bride might not have greater risk of a child with congenital anomaly compared to an older, unrelated British mother.
Doctors seek out postings to places like Bradford so that they get the chance to deal with conditions that you would not normally see.
Interesting that this kind of anti-immigrant stuff seems to get such free rein now.
Another group in which marriages between cousins are quite common is the Jewish community. Do people here generally think that "importing Jews is importing problems", I wonder?
I merely shared an anecdote. And what would I know? My brother in law only worked at Bradford Royal Infirmary for 30 years. And he's an immigrant.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
Im beginning to think Kinabalu is some sort of woke bot. Even the average Hampstead resident doesnt have such ludicrous opinions consistently.
Billions needed for the triple lock, add in many billions for NHS, Education, Defence, Water and Sewage, Social care and someone sometime is going to have to make very unpopular decisions whether it is Starmer or anyone else it has to happen
Obvious targets are wealth taxes, wage restraints, reduction in many areas of public spending or if not can someone indicate what the magic bullet is
Wealth taxes implemented in the most cackhanded way imaginable seems favourite.
We are spending £181 billion on the NHS and £100 billion on debt interest at present alone
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If we don't have large scale immigration we are going to need a lot of retired people to go back into work and we are going to have to develop ways to get the inactive to move to parts of the country where they can become active and afford to live. We are also going to have to close down a lot of universities and somehow get younger people to have more kids. This will all involve a much higher tax burden than the one we have even now. If we just dramatically cut immigration without accepting the pay-offs the consequences will be immensely unpopular very quickly.
I wouldn't deny any of that. As a nation we have become stupidly reliant on the quick fix of mass immigration. It is not sustainable, per se, and we are now also seeing many of the negative side effects that come with it
Weaning ourselves off this drug will be painful. I don't think Starmer has the cullions to do it. but in the end someone will have to grasp the nettle
Of course, if AI fulfils its huge potential that would help enormously
People will not accept becoming poorer over a sustained period unless they have no choice. And there is always a choice in a democracy. What you want requires dictatorship. And even then you cannot prevent people living longer unless you introduce euthanasia or force women to have babies unless you legalise rape.
What we are seeing is the failure of targetting full employment with an open labour market. We aren't importing so many people because we need them but because the economic consensus of the last 25 years is wrong.
Levels of immigration are higher than they have ever been thanks to decisions specifically taken by the current government. But I agree that longer term we have created a situation where we have failed to invest in public infrastructure and services, so that a lot of jobs have become the preserve of poorly paid immigrants. That is a failure. But who is going to change that? Voters will not tolerate it.
Voters are not an undifferentiated mass. The aggregate economic effect of immigration benefits some voters (particularly the retired) at the expense of others.
On topic: FWIW, the average monthly US Social Security benefit is $1907. https://faq.ssa.gov/en-us/Topic/article/KA-01903 It is indexed for inflation, using the Consumer Price Index. (I think it would not decrease, in the unlikely event of deflation.)
(Recently, the WaPo's fact checker, Glenn Kessler, argued, correctly, I believe, that the presidents most responsible for the US debt problem are Lyndon Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Caveat: I haven't checked Kessler's arithmetic.)
I don't think that the case.
US national debt only really took off with Reaganism in the Eighties.
That clearly took off in the 70s.
Logarithmic scale.
In the eight years under Reagan the national debt tripled, and the trend for debt to be reducing as a percentage of GDP was reversed.
A lot of Reagans prosperity was government debt spending. Not a sustainable policy in the long term, even if desirable in the short. The defence spending in particular brought down the Soviet Union as it couldn't match it.
It has been claimed that the defence spending brought down the Soviet Union, but I don't know if anyone's done a thorough, systematic analysis of that claim. Arguably, the failings of the communist system were just steadily building up and the short-term increase under Reagan on defence spending was irrelevant. I don't know. Does anyone know of a proper analysis?
Tricky, because you'd need to factor in how/whether/when the USSR would have collapsed in any case. And that would be guesswork.
I don’t see why it has to be guesswork. Can’t it be careful historical analysis based on access to Communist-era records? Just wondering if someone’s done that.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
Im beginning to think Kinabalu is some sort of woke bot. Even the average Hampstead resident doesnt have such ludicrous opinions consistently.
How do you define Hampstead, out of interest? The village or the wider (old) borough?
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
Until they consider that in almost every other country in the world they wouldn't have access to a free national health service. And the fact that Britain is the only place in the world with more than 6 million people where the police don't have guns. And so on.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
Do you know that Hispanic Americans have greater life expectancy than white ones? This is despite being in lower SE groups on average. Asian Americans live even longer still.
Isn't that coz of opioids and Tranq, etc, in America? These drugs overwhelmingly impacted poor white America, first. Little towns in West Virgnia and the like: sending life expectancy tumbling
However I believe the drug problem is now hitting other ethnicities, too, so we may see similar problems with Hispanics
The Asian American longevity advantage is not at all surprising - if you mean East Asians. They eat very healthily, they have high IQs, they don't suffer obesity
A mix of reasons, but on current data Hispanic Americans are healthier, so you were wrong.
Hispanic Americans are not a uniform group and many millions of them are undocumented, so you have to take statistics like that with a pinch of salt.
Also, even if you focus on Hispanics, @foxy is wrong
The Hispanic nations that send the most migrants to the USA are
Mexico: life expectancy 70 El Salvador: life expectancy 71 Guatemala: life expectancy 72 Venezuela: life expectancy 71
The USA has a life expectancy of 77, so if it imports people from these countries then its life expectancy will go down
"Life expectancy at birth is largely determined by childhood mortality."
Use your brain.
It's absolute bollocks
American life expectancy has been in steep decline, not because lots of American babies are dying, but because Americans are taking opioids, becoming obese, getting killed in road accidents, and shooting each other and themselves, and so on. And they are also importing lots of poor people, and poor people die younger
Let me spell it out for you, then. You are comparing the life expectancy at birth of separate countries, and assuming that comparison still applies to immigrants into the US from those comparator countries.
That's a basic logic fail.
No, it's not
Let me spell it out for you, then
There are many determinants of life expectancy. Income, literacy, nutrition, and so on. By the time someone migrates to the USA, from a poor country with low life expectancy, a lot of these determinants will have already formed the life expectancy of the migrant, so even if they get access to the very best US health care (er, unlikely) they will probably die younger than the average American who has NOT had the issues of literacy, poverty, bad nutrition in early life, etc
Conversely, if America imported 200 million Japanese or Icelandic people, America's average life expectancy would go UP
Of course as the decades pass, the 2nd and 3rd generations will do a lot better and converge on the American norm
Regardless of anything else, it's sweet to see that Leon's got a new bestie.
I'm intrigued by this. If 'Trent' is genuine (and not some hoax by another poster) then can it really be that Russia is sending bots here with the specific intention of poking Leon with a stick? Amazing if true.
Billions needed for the triple lock, add in many billions for NHS, Education, Defence, Water and Sewage, Social care and someone sometime is going to have to make very unpopular decisions whether it is Starmer or anyone else it has to happen
Obvious targets are wealth taxes, wage restraints, reduction in many areas of public spending or if not can someone indicate what the magic bullet is
Wealth taxes implemented in the most cackhanded way imaginable seems favourite.
We are spending £181 billion on the NHS and £100 billion on debt interest at present alone
Last Days Of Rome. The West's debt problem cannot be solved, whatever is tried is deckchair shuffling. Its over, frankly
On thread: this just shows the extent to which the mentality of "the government has money and if it doesn't spend it it's because it's being greedy" persists. People don't, inherently, grasp where government money comes from.
Redistribution is popular amongst those who aren't paying for it shock!
I think too that the there are only 7 500 000 people currently paying into private pensions in the UK, with an average contribution of £1600.
This means that the majority are reliant on the State Pension, and even those in schemed it is likely to be the majority of their income in retirement.
Hence support for the triple lock.
The Gov't needs to have an endpoint for the triple lock though whether it's in terms of wages or prices (Or perhaps the higher both). The ratchet means it leaps between wages and prices, climbing ever higher than each measure individually.
Regardless of anything else, it's sweet to see that Leon's got a new bestie.
I'm intrigued by this. If 'Trent' is genuine (and not some hoax by another poster) then can it really be that Russia is sending bots here with the specific intention of poking Leon with a stick? Amazing if true.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
Im beginning to think Kinabalu is some sort of woke bot. Even the average Hampstead resident doesnt have such ludicrous opinions consistently.
How do you define Hampstead, out of interest? The village or the wider (old) borough?
I would base it on annual tofu consumption per capita.
Manchester police re-investigating Angela Rayner council house claims
Labour’s deputy leader is accused of breaking electoral law for allegedly giving false information relating to capital gains tax on her former Stockport house
Police are reassessing claims that Angela Rayner broke electoral law after receiving a complaint from the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party.
James Daly, the MP for Bury North, said Greater Manchester police had failed to properly investigate claims the Labour deputy leader may have broken the law in the early 2010s when she lived between two council houses in Stockport.
On Monday the police confirmed that a detective chief inspector had been assigned to reconsider the case, putting pressure on Rayner again, days after she launched a fightback in the media.
Obviously giving false information re CGT would be a breach of tax law but I'm not clear why it would be a breach of electoral law?
False info on the electoral roll/where registered to vote is a crime punishable by up to 6 months or unlimited fine. It's that the allegation relates to
Edit - I believe they are angling that if no crime occured re addresses registered to vote etc then the tax implications of the sales don't add up. Its a 'one or the other is wrong' accusation
That is nonsense. You can be registered to vote at multiple addresses.
Someone should ask GMP to investige Mr Daly for wasting police time.
Providing false information about where you live and are registered to vote to the EC is a criminal offence, that isn't nonsense. I'm not accusing her, just saying what they are being asked to look at
Unless the process has changed since I was an agent in 2015 candidates do not provide information to the electoral commission - everything goes to local returning officers and they check that the candidate's address on their nomination form corresponds to their electoral register record when papers are submitted. There's no scope for giving a false address, and nor is there any reason for a candidate to do so. At one time candidates' full addresses were printed on ballot papers but this is no longer a requirement, though candidates can still opt for it if they wish.
The honourable member for Shipley gave an address in Cheshire.
Perfectly legal - as long as you have an address in the UK (and meet citizenship requirements etc) you can stand in any constituency.
There are occasional stories of local Coucnillors who have migrated to various Timbuctoos and keep their positions for months or years.
You are quite right @anothernick. Indeed, even if she were standing in a local election, providing she owned a property in the borough where she was standing she would not have committed an offence.
The reporting of Daly's latest claim is somewhat confusing but seems to be based on the misapprehension that your main residence for tax purposes needs to be the same as your residence for electoral purposes. That is categorically not the case.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
If we don't have large scale immigration we are going to need a lot of retired people to go back into work and we are going to have to develop ways to get the inactive to move to parts of the country where they can become active and afford to live. We are also going to have to close down a lot of universities and somehow get younger people to have more kids. This will all involve a much higher tax burden than the one we have even now. If we just dramatically cut immigration without accepting the pay-offs the consequences will be immensely unpopular very quickly.
I wouldn't deny any of that. As a nation we have become stupidly reliant on the quick fix of mass immigration. It is not sustainable, per se, and we are now also seeing many of the negative side effects that come with it
Weaning ourselves off this drug will be painful. I don't think Starmer has the cullions to do it. but in the end someone will have to grasp the nettle
Of course, if AI fulfils its huge potential that would help enormously
People will not accept becoming poorer over a sustained period unless they have no choice. And there is always a choice in a democracy. What you want requires dictatorship. And even then you cannot prevent people living longer unless you introduce euthanasia or force women to have babies unless you legalise rape.
What we are seeing is the failure of targetting full employment with an open labour market. We aren't importing so many people because we need them but because the economic consensus of the last 25 years is wrong.
Levels of immigration are higher than they have ever been thanks to decisions specifically taken by the current government. But I agree that longer term we have created a situation where we have failed to invest in public infrastructure and services, so that a lot of jobs have become the preserve of poorly paid immigrants. That is a failure. But who is going to change that? Voters will not tolerate it.
Voters are not an undifferentiated mass. The aggregate economic effect of immigration benefits some voters (particularly the retired) at the expense of others.
And, ironically, it is the retired who are most anti-immigrant.
Regardless of anything else, it's sweet to see that Leon's got a new bestie.
I'm intrigued by this. If 'Trent' is genuine (and not some hoax by another poster) then can it really be that Russia is sending bots here with the specific intention of poking Leon with a stick? Amazing if true.
Everyone needs a friend.
Winter, spring, summer or fall All you got to do is call.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Billions needed for the triple lock, add in many billions for NHS, Education, Defence, Water and Sewage, Social care and someone sometime is going to have to make very unpopular decisions whether it is Starmer or anyone else it has to happen
Obvious targets are wealth taxes, wage restraints, reduction in many areas of public spending or if not can someone indicate what the magic bullet is
Wealth taxes implemented in the most cackhanded way imaginable seems favourite.
We are spending £181 billion on the NHS and £100 billion on debt interest at present alone
Last Days Of Rome. The West's debt problem cannot be solved, whatever is tried is deckchair shuffling. Its over, frankly
An economic genius on twitter called Richard Murphy reckons we can just print more money to pay it off.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
Im beginning to think Kinabalu is some sort of woke bot. Even the average Hampstead resident doesnt have such ludicrous opinions consistently.
How do you define Hampstead, out of interest? The village or the wider (old) borough?
I would base it on annual tofu consumption per capita.
Billions needed for the triple lock, add in many billions for NHS, Education, Defence, Water and Sewage, Social care and someone sometime is going to have to make very unpopular decisions whether it is Starmer or anyone else it has to happen
Obvious targets are wealth taxes, wage restraints, reduction in many areas of public spending or if not can someone indicate what the magic bullet is
Wealth taxes implemented in the most cackhanded way imaginable seems favourite.
We are spending £181 billion on the NHS and £100 billion on debt interest at present alone
Last Days Of Rome. The West's debt problem cannot be solved, whatever is tried is deckchair shuffling. Its over, frankly
An economic genius on twitter called Richard Murphy reckons we can just print more money to pay it off.
Why waste the opportunity to transfer what remains of public wealth into private hands, slaughter a few million to billion in a big old war and increase authoritarian control over the irradiated remnant drones?!
The latest numbers will disappoint some commenters here: "U.S. life expectancy increased for the first time in two years, according to a new report by the CDC.
The report, released Thursday, marks a notable reversal: People born in the U.S. in 2022 can expect to live 77.5 years, an increase from 76.4 in 2021."
That's in spite of the failure of three successive presidents, Obama, Trump, and Biden, to act effectively against opiod deaths -- which " leveled out between 2021 and 2022, according to a separate CDC report also released Thursday."
(I'll have to look to see which states have the worst overdose problems.)
More In Common a better poll for the Conservatives - the usual split 59-38 so on the high side for Con/Ref compared to other pollsters and the smallest Labour lead in any poll since More in Commons' offering earlier this month (also 42-27).
The R&W poll for Wales is the biggest Labour lead in over a year but comes in as a 14% swing so pretty much on trend. I've not checked but I imagine on those numbers the Conservatives would lose all their Welsh seats to Labour except Brecon & Radnor which the LDs would win.
More In Common a better poll for the Conservatives - the usual split 59-38 so on the high side for Con/Ref compared to other pollsters and the smallest Labour lead in any poll since More in Commons' offering earlier this month (also 42-27).
The R&W poll for Wales is the biggest Labour lead in over a year but comes in as a 14% swing so pretty much on trend. I've not checked but I imagine on those numbers the Conservatives would lose all their Welsh seats to Labour except Brecon & Radnor which the LDs would win.
Yeah it's a Wales wipeout on Redfield, Montgomery and Glwydyr the only one they get close in on 16%
My parents got married in 1963 in what was then Hampstead Town Hall. My Mum grew up in Hampstead, first in a flat her parents rented on Mackeson Road then, when they were turfed out of there, on a council estate in Swiss Cottage. Her parents were thrown out of the Mackeson Road place after they could not afford to buy it from the landlord, who was looking to sell. The price was something like £800. God knows how much it would be now!
More In Common a better poll for the Conservatives - the usual split 59-38 so on the high side for Con/Ref compared to other pollsters and the smallest Labour lead in any poll since More in Commons' offering earlier this month (also 42-27).
The R&W poll for Wales is the biggest Labour lead in over a year but comes in as a 14% swing so pretty much on trend. I've not checked but I imagine on those numbers the Conservatives would lose all their Welsh seats to Labour except Brecon & Radnor which the LDs would win.
The very low Tory figure stems from a miserly 37% 2019 vote retention, with a quarter going to each of Lab and Reform. I wonder if the extra coverage with the Gething handover has had an effect?
Lots of people getting confused (as usual, when statistics are involved) by life expectancy, which is just the mean of the distribution of how long members of a particular cohort live. Often, you can ignore the shape of the distribution, especially if it's "well-behaved". In the case of the US, it is decidedly not well-behaved, as you have all sorts of extremes to contend with: hugely overweight mid-Westerners, very health-conscious West Coast types, and the massive underclass who can't access healthcare without going bankrupt.
So, waving around life expectancy figures like they're the whole picture is misleading. For what it's worth, I think Leon is more right than wrong in this instance, and many of those attacking him are playing the man rather than the ball.
Also for what it's worth, I think Foxy's assertion that life expectancy is largely a product of infant mortality is mostly untrue when comparing developed economies (obviously when comparing (say) the UK with Angola it would absolutely be the major difference).
While I'm here: whoever said the Jewish community has high instances of consanguinity is about a century out of date, at least when talking about the European-descended groupings that make up about 90% of the UK's Jewish community
My parents got married in 1963 in what was then Hampstead Town Hall. My Mum grew up in Hampstead, first in a flat her parents rented on Mackeson Road then, when they were turfed out of there, on a council estate in Swiss Cottage. Her parents were thrown out of the Mackeson Road place after they could not afford to buy it from the landlord, who was looking to sell. The price was something like £800. God knows how much it would be now!
2 bed flats around £600k, so not unusual for London prices.
Lots of people getting confused (as usual, when statistics are involved) by life expectancy, which is just the mean of the distribution of how long members of a particular cohort live. Often, you can ignore the shape of the distribution, especially if it's "well-behaved". In the case of the US, it is decidedly not well-behaved, as you have all sorts of extremes to contend with: hugely overweight mid-Westerners, very health-conscious West Coast types, and the massive underclass who can't access healthcare without going bankrupt.
So, waving around life expectancy figures like they're the whole picture is misleading. For what it's worth, I think Leon is more right than wrong in this instance, and many of those attacking him are playing the man rather than the ball.
Also for what it's worth, I think Foxy's assertion that life expectancy is largely a product of infant mortality is mostly untrue when comparing developed economies (obviously when comparing (say) the UK with Angola it would absolutely be the major difference).
While I'm here: whoever said the Jewish community has high instances of consanguinity is about a century out of date, at least when talking about the European-descended groupings that make up about 90% of the UK's Jewish community
Also cousin marriage in people from (etc) Pakistan was being identified as a concern and worked on decades ago (I happened to know someone who was involved in one such programme). No idea if it still is an issue.
Mind you Green councillors oppose solar farms in their area all the time.
Bart is someone I rarely agree with but he is right on his "Screw the NIMBY" view.
Solar farms are an eyesore and generate leccy when we don't need it, and don't generate when we do.
I'd be opposing them if I was a councillor.
There's no such thing as leccy when we don't need it.
Especially as we become more battery based.
You're typical NIMBY scum, with all due respect. Opposing housing, infrastructure, utilities, all par for the course.
There is also no such thing as food when we don't need it, and that's a much better use of agricultural land. I am disappointed that as an avowed free marketeer you are so vituperative in your defence of a poor method of power generation that is incapable of surviving in this country without subsidy, or forcing companies into energy purchase agreements via legislation. Even solar farms in Arizona have difficulties with viability - their presence in rainy Britain is an affront to common sense and the free market.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
On topic: FWIW, the average monthly US Social Security benefit is $1907. https://faq.ssa.gov/en-us/Topic/article/KA-01903 It is indexed for inflation, using the Consumer Price Index. (I think it would not decrease, in the unlikely event of deflation.)
(Recently, the WaPo's fact checker, Glenn Kessler, argued, correctly, I believe, that the presidents most responsible for the US debt problem are Lyndon Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Caveat: I haven't checked Kessler's arithmetic.)
I don't think that the case.
US national debt only really took off with Reaganism in the Eighties.
That clearly took off in the 70s.
Logarithmic scale.
In the eight years under Reagan the national debt tripled, and the trend for debt to be reducing as a percentage of GDP was reversed.
A lot of Reagans prosperity was government debt spending. Not a sustainable policy in the long term, even if desirable in the short. The defence spending in particular brought down the Soviet Union as it couldn't match it.
It has been claimed that the defence spending brought down the Soviet Union, but I don't know if anyone's done a thorough, systematic analysis of that claim. Arguably, the failings of the communist system were just steadily building up and the short-term increase under Reagan on defence spending was irrelevant. I don't know. Does anyone know of a proper analysis?
Tricky, because you'd need to factor in how/whether/when the USSR would have collapsed in any case. And that would be guesswork.
I don’t see why it has to be guesswork. Can’t it be careful historical analysis based on access to Communist-era records? Just wondering if someone’s done that.
A chap I worked with was looking at the former Soviet Union oil industry. Went all round the ‘stans in the 90s. Learnt not just Russian, but Soviet accounting methods, and so local languages (a bit).
His considered opinion was the oil industry was a net negative for the Soviet economy. That is, it was so badly run, that it would have been better to cap the wells and import.
He also told me, that he’d got talking to docs at a local hospital in some one horse town, annd figured out another scam. In SU times, birth rate was all about the next generation of soldiers. So yay for lots of new recruits for the Red Army.
What he figured out, and the docs confirmed, was that the figures sent to the Ministry in Moscow included late term abortions with the actual births. When the SU ended, it wasn’t so much that the birth rate collapsed as they stopped lying up the chain….
Some of the oil stuff was mad - figures reported up the line were improved at each step. For some refined products, the number in Moscow was double the actual number.
More In Common a better poll for the Conservatives - the usual split 59-38 so on the high side for Con/Ref compared to other pollsters and the smallest Labour lead in any poll since More in Commons' offering earlier this month (also 42-27).
The R&W poll for Wales is the biggest Labour lead in over a year but comes in as a 14% swing so pretty much on trend. I've not checked but I imagine on those numbers the Conservatives would lose all their Welsh seats to Labour except Brecon & Radnor which the LDs would win.
The LDs will not win Brecon and Radnor. Labour will not win Montgomery and Glyndwr.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
Do you know that Hispanic Americans have greater life expectancy than white ones? This is despite being in lower SE groups on average. Asian Americans live even longer still.
Isn't that coz of opioids and Tranq, etc, in America? These drugs overwhelmingly impacted poor white America, first. Little towns in West Virgnia and the like: sending life expectancy tumbling
However I believe the drug problem is now hitting other ethnicities, too, so we may see similar problems with Hispanics
The Asian American longevity advantage is not at all surprising - if you mean East Asians. They eat very healthily, they have high IQs, they don't suffer obesity
A mix of reasons, but on current data Hispanic Americans are healthier, so you were wrong.
Hispanic Americans are not a uniform group and many millions of them are undocumented, so you have to take statistics like that with a pinch of salt.
Also, even if you focus on Hispanics, @foxy is wrong
The Hispanic nations that send the most migrants to the USA are
Mexico: life expectancy 70 El Salvador: life expectancy 71 Guatemala: life expectancy 72 Venezuela: life expectancy 71
The USA has a life expectancy of 77, so if it imports people from these countries then its life expectancy will go down
"Life expectancy at birth is largely determined by childhood mortality."
Use your brain.
It's absolute bollocks
American life expectancy has been in steep decline, not because lots of American babies are dying, but because Americans are taking opioids, becoming obese, getting killed in road accidents, and shooting each other and themselves, and so on. And they are also importing lots of poor people, and poor people die younger
Let me spell it out for you, then. You are comparing the life expectancy at birth of separate countries, and assuming that comparison still applies to immigrants into the US from those comparator countries.
That's a basic logic fail.
No, it's not
Let me spell it out for you, then
There are many determinants of life expectancy. Income, literacy, nutrition, and so on. By the time someone migrates to the USA, from a poor country with low life expectancy, a lot of these determinants will have already formed the life expectancy of the migrant, so even if they get access to the very best US health care (er, unlikely) they will probably die younger than the average American who has NOT had the issues of literacy, poverty, bad nutrition in early life, etc
Conversely, if America imported 200 million Japanese or Icelandic people, America's average life expectancy would go UP
Of course as the decades pass, the 2nd and 3rd generations will do a lot better and converge on the American norm
That may be true.
But you need evidence to prove it. I.e. what is the life expectancy of a Mexican who leaves for the US versus one who stays.
Ponder on this: it has often been wondered why Americans and Australians tend to have greater risk appetite than Europeans. And the academic consensus is that people who emigrated to the US were those who were more likely to take risk of pursuit of gain. The risk averse stayed home, the risk keen left for the new world.
It is entirely possible that it is the healthier that are more likely to emigrate. I have no evidence that is true - but then nor do you.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
My parents got married in 1963 in what was then Hampstead Town Hall. My Mum grew up in Hampstead, first in a flat her parents rented on Mackeson Road then, when they were turfed out of there, on a council estate in Swiss Cottage. Her parents were thrown out of the Mackeson Road place after they could not afford to buy it from the landlord, who was looking to sell. The price was something like £800. God knows how much it would be now!
2 bed flats around £600k, so not unusual for London prices.
Obviously, that's a ridiculous amount of money, but I'm surprised it's not more.
Weather: trick is to man up and just get out there and do whatever you want to regardless. Assume changeability. Don't bank on anything. But don't let it affect your plans.
You can control if you have the right clothes. So bring and wear the right clothes.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
PB offers a safe space for right wingers in the arts and left wingers in finance alike.
Lots of people getting confused (as usual, when statistics are involved) by life expectancy, which is just the mean of the distribution of how long members of a particular cohort live. Often, you can ignore the shape of the distribution, especially if it's "well-behaved". In the case of the US, it is decidedly not well-behaved, as you have all sorts of extremes to contend with: hugely overweight mid-Westerners, very health-conscious West Coast types, and the massive underclass who can't access healthcare without going bankrupt.
So, waving around life expectancy figures like they're the whole picture is misleading. For what it's worth, I think Leon is more right than wrong in this instance, and many of those attacking him are playing the man rather than the ball.
Also for what it's worth, I think Foxy's assertion that life expectancy is largely a product of infant mortality is mostly untrue when comparing developed economies (obviously when comparing (say) the UK with Angola it would absolutely be the major difference).
While I'm here: whoever said the Jewish community has high instances of consanguinity is about a century out of date, at least when talking about the European-descended groupings that make up about 90% of the UK's Jewish community
Also cousin marriage in people from (etc) Pakistan was being identified as a concern and worked on decades ago (I happened to know someone who was involved in one such programme). No idea if it still is an issue.
I think the issue there is that those Pakistani marriages were arranged, and in many cases, forced. The latter is a non-issue in the Jewish community; the former is present, but only at fairly low levels, and generally there is an opt-out available.
Weather: trick is to man up and just get out there and do whatever you want to regardless. Assume changeability. Don't bank on anything. But don't let it affect your plans.
You can control if you have the right clothes. So bring and wear the right clothes.
100%. Well said.
First and only time you two will agree on anything in 2024?
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
Lots of people getting confused (as usual, when statistics are involved) by life expectancy, which is just the mean of the distribution of how long members of a particular cohort live. Often, you can ignore the shape of the distribution, especially if it's "well-behaved". In the case of the US, it is decidedly not well-behaved, as you have all sorts of extremes to contend with: hugely overweight mid-Westerners, very health-conscious West Coast types, and the massive underclass who can't access healthcare without going bankrupt.
So, waving around life expectancy figures like they're the whole picture is misleading. For what it's worth, I think Leon is more right than wrong in this instance, and many of those attacking him are playing the man rather than the ball.
Also for what it's worth, I think Foxy's assertion that life expectancy is largely a product of infant mortality is mostly untrue when comparing developed economies (obviously when comparing (say) the UK with Angola it would absolutely be the major difference).
While I'm here: whoever said the Jewish community has high instances of consanguinity is about a century out of date, at least when talking about the European-descended groupings that make up about 90% of the UK's Jewish community
Also cousin marriage in people from (etc) Pakistan was being identified as a concern and worked on decades ago (I happened to know someone who was involved in one such programme). No idea if it still is an issue.
I think the issue there is that those Pakistani marriages were arranged, and in many cases, forced. The latter is a non-issue in the Jewish community; the former is present, but only at fairly low levels, and generally there is an opt-out available.
Isn’t it associated with consolidating land ownership, in Pakistan?
Weather: trick is to man up and just get out there and do whatever you want to regardless. Assume changeability. Don't bank on anything. But don't let it affect your plans.
You can control if you have the right clothes. So bring and wear the right clothes.
100%. Well said.
First and only time you two will agree on anything in 2024?
I agree with him on more things than you might immediately imagine. There is lots of world out there beyond party politics.
Comments
(ducks)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
Labour 49% (+4)
Conservatives 16% (-6)
Reform UK 15% (+2)
Plaid 10% (–)
Lib Dem 5% (–)
Green 5% (–)
Other 1% (–)
Changes +/- 18 Feb
Quality stuff from the TaffyTories
That's not necessarily true at all.
Maybe life expectancy in those countries is low because there is next to no provision for health care for old people. Maybe it is low because it is the fittest, healthiest, people who emigrate?
You need to look at the life expectancy for someone who comes to a country, not to look at the life expectancy of the people left behind
For example, Singapore has absolutely masses of poor immigrants from SE Asia and one of the highest life expectancies in the world
They should take full responsibility of their choices.
Especially as we become more battery based.
You're typical NIMBY scum, with all due respect. Opposing housing, infrastructure, utilities, all par for the course.
If you import lots of short people, the average height of a nation will go down
Height doesn't vary much as an adult based upon your choices.
Life expectancy does.
The largest group of foreign born in the USA are Hispanic, particularly Mexican.
In any case, Asians too live longer than white Americans.
Your assertion that immigration is reducing American life expectancy is simply wrong. If anything it is improving it.
I appreciate this doesn't fit neatly in your alt.right rabbit hole, but thems the facts.
"The vast majority of immigrants to America are Hispanics"
And that is simply false; at present it is a roughly equal mix of Asians and Hispanics as the two main groups, with others following. Haitians are now a significant element, more Africans are coming, and so on
Hispanics are not the vast majority
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/03/dna-tests-incest/677791/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Use your brain.
Weaning ourselves off this drug will be painful. I don't think Starmer has the cullions to do it. but in the end someone will have to grasp the nettle
Of course, if AI fulfils its huge potential that would help enormously
Be kind.
American life expectancy has been in steep decline, not because lots of American babies are dying, but because Americans are taking opioids, becoming obese, getting killed in road accidents, and shooting each other and themselves, and so on. And they are also importing lots of poor people, and poor people die younger
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
Plenty of societies do fine, economically, without having UK levels of immigration
I think too that the there are only 7 500 000 people currently paying into private pensions in the UK, with an average contribution of £1600.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/personal-and-stakeholder-pensions-statistics/private-pension-statistics-commentary-september-2022#reported-annual-individual-contributions-to-personal-pension-schemes
This means that the majority are reliant on the State Pension, and even those in schemed it is likely to be the majority of their income in retirement.
Hence support for the triple lock.
Another group in which marriages between cousins are quite common is the Jewish community. Do people here generally think that "importing Jews is importing problems", I wonder?
Remarkable
Obvious targets are wealth taxes, wage restraints, reduction in many areas of public spending or if not can someone indicate what the magic bullet is
You are comparing the life expectancy at birth of separate countries, and assuming that comparison still applies to immigrants into the US from those comparator countries.
That's a basic logic fail.
There is a nearly religious belief (in the U.K.) that organisations must be run by generalists - accountants and lawyers.
An actual bomber-and-shooter like Marty wouldn’t had a lookin.
Let me spell it out for you, then
There are many determinants of life expectancy. Income, literacy, nutrition, and so on. By the time someone migrates to the USA, from a poor country with low life expectancy, a lot of these determinants will have already formed the life expectancy of the migrant, so even if they get access to the very best US health care (er, unlikely) they will probably die younger than the average American who has NOT had the issues of literacy, poverty, bad nutrition in early life, etc
Conversely, if America imported 200 million Japanese or Icelandic people, America's average life expectancy would go UP
Of course as the decades pass, the 2nd and 3rd generations will do a lot better and converge on the American norm
The West's debt problem cannot be solved, whatever is tried is deckchair shuffling. Its over, frankly
The reporting of Daly's latest claim is somewhat confusing but seems to be based on the misapprehension that your main residence for tax purposes needs to be the same as your residence for electoral purposes. That is categorically not the case.
https://x.com/hamimages/status/1772940667116789952?s=61
All you got to do is call.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
It was a scam, derrr
Tho I didn' fall for it, I am happy to say
"U.S. life expectancy increased for the first time in two years, according to a new report by the CDC.
The report, released Thursday, marks a notable reversal: People born in the U.S. in 2022 can expect to live 77.5 years, an increase from 76.4 in 2021."
sources: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/21/cdc-us-life-expectancy-rises-after-two-year-dip-00148193
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db492.htm
That's in spite of the failure of three successive presidents, Obama, Trump, and Biden, to act effectively against opiod deaths -- which " leveled out between 2021 and 2022, according to a separate CDC report also released Thursday."
(I'll have to look to see which states have the worst overdose problems.)
More In Common a better poll for the Conservatives - the usual split 59-38 so on the high side for Con/Ref compared to other pollsters and the smallest Labour lead in any poll since More in Commons' offering earlier this month (also 42-27).
The R&W poll for Wales is the biggest Labour lead in over a year but comes in as a 14% swing so pretty much on trend. I've not checked but I imagine on those numbers the Conservatives would lose all their Welsh seats to Labour except Brecon & Radnor which the LDs would win.
So, waving around life expectancy figures like they're the whole picture is misleading. For what it's worth, I think Leon is more right than wrong in this instance, and many of those attacking him are playing the man rather than the ball.
Also for what it's worth, I think Foxy's assertion that life expectancy is largely a product of infant mortality is mostly untrue when comparing developed economies (obviously when comparing (say) the UK with Angola it would absolutely be the major difference).
While I'm here: whoever said the Jewish community has high instances of consanguinity is about a century out of date, at least when talking about the European-descended groupings that make up about 90% of the UK's Jewish community
Either that or he can't read, which seems very unlikely however given he used to be a teacher.
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
His considered opinion was the oil industry was a net negative for the Soviet economy. That is, it was so badly run, that it would have been better to cap the wells and import.
He also told me, that he’d got talking to docs at a local hospital in some one horse town, annd figured out another scam. In SU times, birth rate was all about the next generation of soldiers. So yay for lots of new recruits for the Red Army.
What he figured out, and the docs confirmed, was that the figures sent to the Ministry in Moscow included late term abortions with the actual births. When the SU ended, it wasn’t so much that the birth rate collapsed as they stopped lying up the chain….
Some of the oil stuff was mad - figures reported up the line were improved at each step. For some refined products, the number in Moscow was double the actual number.
Treat polls of Mid-Wales with great caution.
But you need evidence to prove it. I.e. what is the life expectancy of a Mexican who leaves for the US versus one who stays.
Ponder on this: it has often been wondered why Americans and Australians tend to have greater risk appetite than Europeans. And the academic consensus is that people who emigrated to the US were those who were more likely to take risk of pursuit of gain. The risk averse stayed home, the risk keen left for the new world.
It is entirely possible that it is the healthier that are more likely to emigrate. I have no evidence that is true - but then nor do you.
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world