You haven’t answered my questions, of course.

You want to get rid of pensions – you want old people to be poorer than they are now. But you have no sensible arguments.

You describe old age pensioners as ‘languishing on benefits’, when they have paid taxes all their lives – and are still doing so on fuel and purchases as well as on savings and private pension income. Can you explain why you use such derogatory and inaccurate language when talking about the elderly? What work would you put our grand and great-grand parents to?

Is making old people poor the only way to be a ‘winner’ in the free market?

Who exactly wins?

i didn’t say ‘must’ i said will. it will happen because we cant afford to pay it. the easiest way to stop that happening is to get the 1 in 5 people who are languishing on benefits back to work and making it easier for those that enjoy working to carry on past ‘normal’ retirement age (maybe ramping down hours rather than suddenly stopping at some pre-ordained date)

Why ‘must’?

What you mean is that this is what you want to happen.

Wasn’t it the case, as the article makes plain, that we were promised increased living standards and wealth if we followed the free market?

Now we are being told that to ‘win’ we must become poorer.

The question is : were your side lying all along, or were they simply wrong?

I think this is part of the problem.

The article talks about the deep-seated corruption and the fantasy economics of the ruling class and what we get in reply is this standard issue rubbish.

In the vain hope that, just for once, reason will be taken into account, are you suggesting that everyone eligible for a state pension is going to start claiming it on the same day and that the entire sum due to them for the rest of their lives is paid out in one go? And, at the same time, all tax revenued from current empoyees will cease now and forever? Otherwise what possible significance does the figure you trot out have?

You talk about tax revenues being insufficient to pay off future pension liability. But you have made a grand total out of all the future years liability and used just one year’s income to set against it. That’s either fundamentally dishonest or an indication that your attack on pensions is exactly the same as the privileging of the rich that has already done so much harm to society.

So, that’s not even touching on the specifics of pension affordability in commonly understood terms. You haven’t even got the basic facts and figures right.

retirement age will jump hugely for the next generation. public sector pensions will be massively downgraded. what we have seen is nothing

On your diagnosis, its all bunk. The only issue is fraud and false accounting. That’s enabled the likes of you to loot everyone’s state pension to the extent that you can’t pay the promise. That promise being to give back 20p’s worth of every pound contributed.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171766_263808.pdf Page 4.

Liabiltiies for the state pension, 4,700 bn pounds. On top of that is borrowing, civil service pensions, ….

Tax revenue, 550 bn.

You can’t pay it. You and the rest of the political class from Cameron, to the lib dems to that incompetent Brown have bankrupted the UK.

So forget silver bullets, its going to be lead.