Thursday, June 07, 2007

Social Pensions

Hadn't come across this concept before, but it looks really interesting. Social pensions are a way of getting a very modest income to vulnerable citizens of poor nations, which can relieve the economic pressure on struggling families.

Read more about Pensions, not Poverty at the Help the Aged website.

3 comments:

a person said...

I strongly believe that the only way to stop poverty amongst the elderly is if we scrap the whole idea of retirement and pensions. Captialism says we work to earn money for our benefit - working is a good thing - and then we go against this by saying once you've reached a certain age you can stop and be funded by other people largely. We need to win the argument that we work for the good of ourselves and of society and therefore we should work until we can longer work.

Mike Peatman said...

The down side of the capitalist vision you advocate is poverty for the unemployed elderly, and a log-jam in the jobs market, leaving young debt-ridden ex-students unemployed.

But then, deep down I'm a socialist. It's a Nottingham thing - rob the rich to give to the poor!

a person said...

Aah I still have a strong socialist side but I'm more of a Tony Blair third way kind of person who believes that socialism only works in certain ways.

The advantage of people working longer would mean more taxes being paid which would allow a higher rate of unemployment benefit to be paid to those who are long term unemployed. If we combined the idea with various other measures such as changing our attitude to how we view the eldely in work then I'm sure we could actually stimulate job creation.