Pensions
The trouble with this country is that demographics blah blah Gordon Brown yadda yadda final salary wibble...

Basically, there's no money to pay pensions for anyone because the stock market losses have killed off all the private sector schemes and the defecit is doing it for the public sector ones.

So from now on, it is illegal to take paid employment under the age of 30. Everyone does whatever the hell they like, on account, until they hit 30, and then everyone has to take a job. Once that job is taken, you get no further paid time off work (except weekends and bank holiday, subject to contract) until you drop dead from overwork aged about 77. You can buy time off - £10,000 per day. The more you earn, the more you can take time off, but the more you take time off, the less you can earn. There's no such thing as idle rich any more, and even the very well paid aren't working to get rich, but to pay off the debt they owe for everything they did up to age 30 (including all the childcare, education, food and anything else they did or consumed before then). Parents would no longer pay for their kids upkeep or care, and wouldn't even be legally responsible for doing it (though most would, just because they wanted to, which would tot up as a debt in the child's account just like any other).

You can stay in education as long as you like, you can sit in a chair scratching your bollocks watching TV, you can back pack around the world learning to surf and grow dreadlocks, you can shit out as many kids as you can, but at 30, the fun ends and you have to start paying for it all.

Healthcare is lavish and generous under 30, to make the most of people's lives while they are fully capable of enjoying them. After 30, it's as functional as for a racehorse - you're made fit to work, or put down if that's going to be too expensive.

Oh, and only the productive over-30s have a vote.

It's like a toned-down capitalist version of Logan's Run. Except nobody would have seen Jenny Agutter's baps before she turned 30 (she was a paid actor, which would have been illegal).

No more demographic timebomb, because if lifespans continue to lengthen, your "retirement" still only lasts 30 years and can never get any longer.

That'd be bound to work, wouldn't it?

Oh, OK
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Mon 26 Sep 2011, 14:44, 4 replies)

To refine it to a vaguely realistic level:
45-year contracts when you start w**k, that you're locked into and guaranteed.

One lump sum paid to you when you start, for the whole 45 years, thus you can buy a house straight off, kit it out, &c &c.

How you spend the rest is up to you.

Advantages: no interest to pay on the mortgage, car, furniture &c.
Disadvantages: being locked into a 45-year contract, having to manage one's own finances far more carefully.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Mon 26 Sep 2011, 14:48, closed)

Pah! Who needs realism?
I didn't realise I was supposed to be serious or constructive. Sorry.
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Mon 26 Sep 2011, 15:16, closed)

Actually
It was Mr. Brown's tax changes that caused companies to stop topping-up their pensions. And there was me thinking Labour was pro-work. Pfft.
(SpangleDangle >->)))'>, Mon 26 Sep 2011, 15:55, closed)

Ummmm
No it wasn't. Google "contribution holidays" - they began in the late 1980s when the then-chancellor, Fatboy Lawson, threatened to tax "over-funded" pension funds. www.opalliance.org.uk/decline.htm
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Tue 27 Sep 2011, 14:04, closed)