James Bartholomew, among others in the UK, are fast approaching the realization that the pension system is a scam.

I am finally figuring out who the losers are going to be. I initially thought that the younger generation would be forced to pay for old peoples' exaggerated pension benefits that they gave to themselves without asking anyone. That is incomplete. The young folks will eventually have the voting power to say -- oops someone made a mistake here, redo. Guess who is going to be the loser -- a subset of old folks who will not be able to retire until they are 70 fucking years old.

In the US I have heard Bush, and others, trumpet the vast increase in productivity of the American Workforce. Look how great we are, it take fewer works to produce the same amount of stuff, as measured by the GDP. If that is true, then we should, or could, be LOWERING the retirement age. Well . . . we are lowering the retirement age, but only for some . . . at the expense of others. If you think of age-of-retirement as the same thing as cash-in-hand then this is disgustingly inequitable. Cash . . . or reaching the point of being "independently wealthy” . . . is the ultimate goal. That translates, roughly, to the identical thing - - the date you can start enjoying life rather working like a dog.