In the paper itself, we source the savings roughly from three sources (plus the elimination of foreign aid): state pension reduction by around a third, halving spending on disability/incapacity benefit, and eliminating housing benefit (since we're mass building social houses).
On the electoral calculus: all you need is a significant cohort of socially conscious pensioners that believe in passing on a functional state and economy to their children and grandchildren. I don't think that's off the table. Especially if you're honest with the public in that they are bearing a cost for a measurable future gain.
Does this not start to resolve itself at a certain point, when more people die of old age than reach retirement? Slightly morbid but worth consideration.
I think the trouble with that is life expectancy has increased at a faster than people's expectation of how long they will work for and contribute to a pension. When state pensions started, most people were supposed to die before they could draw it. And many people can be kept alive for many, many years if they fall ill. Was that the real reason for the Assisted Suicide Bill?
I liked your article and the analysis. At the age of 75 now, I can see how things are just getting worse and worse and realise where it all started to go wrong. Terrible roads and other poor infrastructure are not the result of recent events, or even Brexit, but have been coming because of underinvestment over decades.
But the way back out of it? With very few politicians of the right calibre, and turkeys not voting for Christmas, I cannot see a solution beyond a revolution.
While I'm sympathetic to much of this, it is worth saying that most of that drop-off in public investment is the end of mass council house building rather than other types of investments - see chart 4.1 here: https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/bn20.pdf
Public investment averaged 5.3% of GDP in the 1955-75 period, and 1.7% in the 1975-2025 period.
So a 3.6% fall, of which housing represented 2%. That still means around 45% of lost public investment spending was going to non-housing investments. So I don't think this challenges the narrative we present.
In fact, I'd argue it strengthens our wider set of proposals in The Investment State. Our paper proposes a reallocation of around 50% of our entitlement reallocation to a national housebuilding programme in the first 15 years. This is far more efficient than housing benefit, which is one of the budget items that we propose scrapping to fund our reallocation.
The only person who could lead on a policy so painful to the majority would be an acclaimed Tribune of the People, who was in fact no such thing. A wolf in sheeps clothing, if you will. I wonder who in our current politics this could be?
Is the drop in public capital investment post 1979 not due to the state no longer being a font of utility, the railways, water, gas, electricity industries were privatised and run for rent and certainly not as the foundation for productivity.
It is partially due to this, yes. Along with collapse in social housebuilding (see Neil O'Brien's comment).
As I point out in that chart with the pub+pri investment with structural productivity growth, public investment's collapse wasn't matched by corresponding private investment growth to maintain overall net investment levels. That would indeed reflect under-investment in privatised utilities for asset sweating.
tough optically when 50%+ of the entitlement budget is pensions, but agree
In the paper itself, we source the savings roughly from three sources (plus the elimination of foreign aid): state pension reduction by around a third, halving spending on disability/incapacity benefit, and eliminating housing benefit (since we're mass building social houses).
On the electoral calculus: all you need is a significant cohort of socially conscious pensioners that believe in passing on a functional state and economy to their children and grandchildren. I don't think that's off the table. Especially if you're honest with the public in that they are bearing a cost for a measurable future gain.
Does this not start to resolve itself at a certain point, when more people die of old age than reach retirement? Slightly morbid but worth consideration.
I think the trouble with that is life expectancy has increased at a faster than people's expectation of how long they will work for and contribute to a pension. When state pensions started, most people were supposed to die before they could draw it. And many people can be kept alive for many, many years if they fall ill. Was that the real reason for the Assisted Suicide Bill?
I liked your article and the analysis. At the age of 75 now, I can see how things are just getting worse and worse and realise where it all started to go wrong. Terrible roads and other poor infrastructure are not the result of recent events, or even Brexit, but have been coming because of underinvestment over decades.
But the way back out of it? With very few politicians of the right calibre, and turkeys not voting for Christmas, I cannot see a solution beyond a revolution.
While I'm sympathetic to much of this, it is worth saying that most of that drop-off in public investment is the end of mass council house building rather than other types of investments - see chart 4.1 here: https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/bn20.pdf
Public investment averaged 5.3% of GDP in the 1955-75 period, and 1.7% in the 1975-2025 period.
So a 3.6% fall, of which housing represented 2%. That still means around 45% of lost public investment spending was going to non-housing investments. So I don't think this challenges the narrative we present.
In fact, I'd argue it strengthens our wider set of proposals in The Investment State. Our paper proposes a reallocation of around 50% of our entitlement reallocation to a national housebuilding programme in the first 15 years. This is far more efficient than housing benefit, which is one of the budget items that we propose scrapping to fund our reallocation.
The only person who could lead on a policy so painful to the majority would be an acclaimed Tribune of the People, who was in fact no such thing. A wolf in sheeps clothing, if you will. I wonder who in our current politics this could be?
Is the drop in public capital investment post 1979 not due to the state no longer being a font of utility, the railways, water, gas, electricity industries were privatised and run for rent and certainly not as the foundation for productivity.
It is partially due to this, yes. Along with collapse in social housebuilding (see Neil O'Brien's comment).
As I point out in that chart with the pub+pri investment with structural productivity growth, public investment's collapse wasn't matched by corresponding private investment growth to maintain overall net investment levels. That would indeed reflect under-investment in privatised utilities for asset sweating.