Harper Pension Reform and Britain

Harper loves the British so stay tuned for this idea or a variaton of it coming into Canada as a method of pension reform.

There are two ideas that Harper could put into his budget on Thursday,  the first is to link the age a person can collect a pension with longevity and it should appeal to the Harper bunch. They will argue personal responsibility and sustainablilty are the keys to pension reform and that this is an idea that could work.

The second idea is The Chancellor's "simplification" of pensions which will hit existing pensioners the most.  The simplification is done by freezing of the age related income tax personal allowance. Specifically the move to freeze age-related tax allowances will hit less wealthy retired people. The Government says this is a measure to 'simplify' the tax system but the reality is that this is really just a revenue-raising exercise.

Figures published by Treasury show that, come next April, in Britain, some 4.41 million pensioners will be worse off in real terms, with an average loss of £83, as a result of the freezing of the age-related income tax personal allowance.

These ideas on the face of it appear to be reasonable, but they do not take into account human nature and past experience. My prediction look for Harper to put some this idea or variations of it up as he fights to destroy the Canadain safety net and take us to a more US based model of government.

 The following was taken from a story written by Toby Helm in the guardian.co.uk, on Saturday 24 March 2012 21.02 GMT  and from an article at Personal Pensions at PensionCalculator.org

Students graduating this summer in Great Britain, can expect to wait until they are at least 71 before receiving a state pension – three years longer than under current plans – following a budget decision to link retirement ages to changes in life expectancy.

The move by chancellor George Osborne to create an automatic link between longevity and the pension age means that tens of millions of people under 50 who expected to retire in their middle to late 60s will have their state pensions shunted between one and three years further back.

While on the face of it that sounds sensible,this  move may create uncertainty about retirement planning. In short, depending on your age, you won't know when you will be eligible to receive your state pension.
Analysis by the country's leading experts in longevity and public sector pensions, Club Vita, suggests that a child born today will have to wait until 74 at the earliest for a state pension. Club Vita is a sister company of Hymans Robertson, a key player in advising on reform of all public sector schemes.

The Government in Britain has already increased the age when people can get the pension and the latest review could mean those currently aged 20 to 30 could be forced to wait until they reach 70 or older. Indeed one estimate this week suggested that a child born in 2012 will have to wait until they reach 80 not 74 as stated above.
"Our analysis suggests that the state pension age will need to rise to 68 and over for those currently aged below 50," said Club Vita's Steven Baxter. "This would accelerate the current plans, bringing forward the rise [to 68] from 2046 to around 2030.People must start preparing for retirement earlier to make up for life expectancy increases and poorer investment returns, a new study have found. In the study it was discovered that only a quarter of those in their fifties have enough saved for retirement.

As they have not saved enough, many baby boomers face making the hard decision of either delaying their retirement and working for longer, in some cases into their 70s, or retiring with an inadequate income. The research found that a third of those in their fifties had no retirement savings at all.

Those currently in their fifties have greatly benefitted from increases in health and life expectancy that no other group of retirees have to the same extent. A man retiring at age 65 now has a life expectancy of 82 and a woman of 85. This means planning to support oneself on a retirement income for a longer period of time.

At the same time the value of savings has dropped, market returns have gotten poorer, company pensions have been axed, the value of the state pension has fallen in real terms and inflation has been higher than expected. Experts now say that many in their fifties have not saved enough in pensions in order to retire comfortably.

In Wednesday's budget Osborne announced that the state pension age will be adjusted automatically "to take into account increases in longevity".

Currently life expectancy is rising by around 2.5 years every decade, meaning ever increasing costs. This rate of increase is expected to continue for the next 10 years before slowing. Ministers argue that the pension system will become unaffordable without reform.

Setting the stage for further conflict with unions, Osborne made clear that the retirement age for public sector workers would also have to climb to reflect future rises in the state pension age. Since the research shows that the majority of people do not know have much they have saved for retirement.  In  fact figures show that Britons are currently chronically under saving for retirement and the sooner someone starts saving, the less they have to contribute to a pension each month. The Government has created the auto-enrolment scheme, which starts to roll out from October, in an attempt to encourage Britons to save more.

Pension experts and groups representing the elderly say ministers will need to take into account the number of healthy years somebody is expected to spend in retirement, as well as life expectancy.
"This gap between full and 'healthy' life expectancy has been widening as the number of years spent in ill health at the end of life has increased," said Baxter. "When increasing state pension age, the issue of whether the extra time before state pension age is spent in good health, with people able to work, needs to be considered."

Michelle Mitchell, Age UK's charity director, said: "Age UK recognises that as life expectancy increases it is reasonable to consider increases to the state pension age and longer working lives; however this decision has been based on no published detailed analysis.

"Average life expectancy must not be the only factor that is considered as, at the moment, the huge disparities in healthy life expectancy across the country means that the poorest socio-economic groups will be required to sacrifice proportionately more of their retirement."

Why do the Conservatives Hate Women?--Look South

I have been reading about the increasing attacks on the rights of women, I am horrified not only because of the attacks but because of the apparent lack of interest by men in this issue.

Facts raised by Bloggers such as Dammit Janet or Dented Blue Mercedes or Dawg's Blawg in Canada and reporters such as Rachel Maddow  and cartoonists like Gary Trudeau (This series was banned in 60 US papers) inhis great strip Doonsbury in the US are important, as these attacks on women take humanity from both men and women. Men, who love their daughters, their granddaughters, their wife, their sisters, their mothers, their women friends have to start speaking out against the laws being enacted in the US as well as the war on women being waged here in Canada and other parts of the world.

I was going to write a post on how I saw the attacks against women in Canada and the US being the same as the attacks on women by the Taliban, and other religious zealots but the following post by Gay has already made my point. 

For those of us in Canada, we have people who have similar views in power now, so the war is coming north, be prepared to fight.

Why Do Republicans Hate Women? Submitted by Gay on Fri, 03/09/2012 - 8:45am (In Canada replace republican with Reform or Conservative.

[In Steven Harpers own words: So there are some non-conservative tendencies in the Reform party, but, that said, the party is clearly the most economically conservative party in the country. It's the closest thing we have to a neo-conservative party in that sense. It's also the most conservative socially, but it's not a theocon party, to use the term. The Reform party does favour the use of referendums and free votes in Parliament on moral issues and social issues. So look for bills on abortion, the death penalty to be put forward by the conservatives over the next few years]

In a word: it’s because they are terrified of women.

Republicans don’t know how to handle a deep fear that lives at the center of the GOP, the Taliban, and other organizations that shame and devalue women. They are scared of being left behind by the growing consciousness of women worldwide, but because they can’t admit this fear they are desperately trying to solve their problem by slowing women down down. Because they cannot acknowledge the fear, they turn it into hate and direct it outwardly toward women. Republicans fear women so much that one of the major unspoken intentions of the Republican agenda is to scare women. Fear is contagious, and by spreading the virus of hate borne of fear, the GOP campaigns relentlessly to make sure women are just as scared as Republicans are.


Republican Or Taliban: No Essential Difference
On one level—attitudes toward women—there is no essential difference between the GOP and the Taliban. Both the Taliban and the GOP are opposed to women’s rights, especially in sensitive areas such as abortion and women’s use of reliable contraceptives. If Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin or Sean Hannity lived in Afghanistan, they’d be cheering for the Taliban, not for the western-style government that’s been grafted onto the country. Republicans and Taliban alike have bombed women’s health clinics and deliberately frightened women who were attempting to use those clinics. The Taliban join with the Vatican and other male-dominated entities to keep women subservient in lesser roles. No woman can ever expect to rise to the top in the Taliban or The Vatican, nor is she likely to have the top job in a Republican White House.


Why Republicans Are Dedicated To Scaring And Shaming Women
Women represent an unstoppable political force. That’s the main reason Republicans are so terrified of them. The Republican Party  (In Canada read the Conservative Party) is the last bastion of the Old Boys, a club with an exclusive membership of presidents, clergy, bankers and gangsters. The Old Boys wield enormous power, and they’ve been doing it so long it terrifies them to think of not being in control. The Old Boys are everywhere—they’re the people you have to get your tax refunds, your religion and your fun times in Vegas from. Varied as they are, these guys have one thing in common: they will do anything they can to hang onto their money and their power. 

The women’s movement of the Sixties scared the heck out of the Old Boys. Recognizing that women are unstoppable if united, the Old Boys brought in the brightest lights of the Right to devise a ploy to divide women once and for all. That’s when the Right decided to politicize abortion. The reasoning went like this: “Half the population has a uterus, so if we can get the owners of those uteruses scared and fighting with each other, we can keep them divided for all time and hang on to our power longer! Hmm, how do we do that? Ah! We start acting like it’s our God-ordained right to own those uteruses! We get a bunch of women to start believing that God and The Government own their uteruses. We convince women that their uteruses are just on temporary loan from God and The Government. We pour shame on women who act like they own their own uteruses! If we can scare women badly enough, they’ll act as the ground troops in our campaign of getting women to hate each other.”

As a strategy it’s worked brilliantly over the past thirty years. Republicans have done such a good job of dividing women that none of the current Republican presidential contenders have emitted so much as the tiniest mouse-squeak about women’s rights. Not just women’s right to choose—women’s rights of ANY kind. Republicans have been emboldened enough now to roll out one of their long-term goals: banning contraception. Rick Santorum is the lead dog of this new enterprise; Fox News viewers can expect to see a great deal of Santorum, in all senses of the word, over the next few years, as he racks up a fortune railing against birth control. Women have feared the anti-abortion crowd, not only for their demented vitriol—the same true-believer energy that burned witches not long ago—but because women knew that the fundamentalists would eventually come after contraceptives. It’s happening.


The Abortion Issue Is Not Really About Abortion
The whole problem becomes much easier to understand if you grasp one essential point: The abortion debate has very little to do with abortion. It’s about who owns women’s bodies. Republicans don’t love fetuses any more than Democrats do, and they certainly seem to have little regard for children once they’re born. Remember, though, it’s not really about abortion, it’s about deliberately frightening women by threatening to possess their uteruses. Republicans know that getting their attention ‘way up in women’s reproductive issues touches a deep place of fear in women. Republicans (In Canada read the Conservatives) know that the more scared women are, the easier they can be manipulated to vote against their own interests.

Organizations such as the GOP and the Taliban have poured enormous energy, time and money into shaming women and trying to destroy institutions that serve them. When the Taliban blows up a women’s clinic in the outback of Afghanistan, or when Republicans conspire to demonize Planned Parenthood, they are fighting a holy war on a subject that is crucial to them: owning women’s bodies. This is a very big deal for the Old Boys. They’re scared that if they lose this one, they might be the ones serving coffee in the boardroom for the next few thousand years.


A Proposal
Here is a suggestion to all those on the right, whether you’re a bombastic radio host, a Republican in the U.S. or a Taliban in Kandahar: Take a year off from shaming women. For one year, change the focus of your shaming. Focus shame on men who try to meddle in women’s business such as abortion. For one year, focus your shame on organizations that won’t give women a chance to apply for the top job. You might even try something really bold: aim your shame at men who procreate carelessly. After thirty-plus years of hearing women shamed relentlessly by male-dominated institutions such as the US House Of Representatives, the GOP, the Taliban and the like, it would be refreshing to go for a spell without hearing endless repetitions of that tired old Garden Of Eden story that it’s all women’s fault.

Congratulations to Thomas Mulcair

I want to add my voice to the rising chorus of those who are saying congratulations on winning the leadership of the New Democratic Party. There will be many opporunities for you to start to bring progressives in this country together to defeat the religious driven, right wing vision of Canada that our current government holds. Congratulations, I know you will be able to deliver on your vision and seize the opportunities as they come up.

Empathy, motivation and realism

In the past few days, there has been an opportunity for me to think about empathy, motivation and realism, and a number of people have emailed different links on these areas. So I would like to share some thoughts from Steve Denning on the links

A New Way To Communicate (Truly)

You've probably seen those artists at conferences, who work at the back of the room and put together a fascinating set of sketches of what was being discussed during the conference. After the session is over, you go over and have a look at it and you can see the threads of the conversation often amusingly depicted on a large board. But there's a lack of connection between the experience of listening to the talk and then later viewing the drawing.

Well, what if the artist was at the front of the room? And what if the sketches were being done in real time, perfectly in sync with what the speaker was saying? You would have a new way to communicate.
  
I was intrigued by his email and I decided to explore and found this interesting channel on YouTube  The RSA . I have for the past few years enjoyed TED (see this link for an explanation of how the idea came about, and this link for a link to TED)and the exploration of new ideas and the way they present the ideas, but  the Royal Society of Arts in London has done more with a series of talks. What's interesting is that they have taken a fairly slow moving fifty minute talk, and turned it into a fast-paced mesmerizing ten minute barn-burner. Astonishing but not surprising. as the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress for over 250 years.

To learn more about the RSA, visit: http://www.thersa.org/