{"id":4530,"date":"2017-04-30T17:00:42","date_gmt":"2017-04-30T17:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=4530"},"modified":"2017-08-26T21:57:54","modified_gmt":"2017-08-26T21:57:54","slug":"are-final-salary-pension-schemes-generous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=4530","title":{"rendered":"Are Final Salary Pension Schemes Generous?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Short answer: NO!<\/p>\n<p>One of the infuriating things I come across is the notion that final salary pension schemes are generous; it seems that a generation of Tory propaganda has persuaded people that such schemes were wildly over-generous and completely affordable. Of course many of those doing the persuading are taking advantage of those &#8220;generous&#8221; pension schemes.<\/p>\n<p>What it is easy to forget is that many of those final salary pension schemes collapsed because successive governments turned a blind eye to the private sector looting pension scheme surpluses and panicking when the surpluses turned into deficits. In other words when pensions were profitable they were affordable, but whenever a company suddenly had to contribute more than it expected they were suddenly too expensive.<\/p>\n<p>Now don&#8217;t get me wrong &#8211; with increasing life expectancy there are problems with funding pension schemes, and we can\u00a0<em>decide<\/em> that they are too expensive, or not. But if a pension scheme was perfectly reasonable in the 1970s, it doesn&#8217;t suddenly become overly generous in the 21st century.<\/p>\n<p>As it is, we have &#8220;decided&#8221; that rather than share wealth out amongst the working-class, it should be kept in the hands of the already wealthy.<\/p>\n<p>Of course we could always decide to revisit that decision and spend more time thinking about it.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-4160\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/B84V1827t1-elderley-man-past-gravestones.jpeg?resize=682%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"682\" height=\"1024\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/B84V1827t1-elderley-man-past-gravestones.jpeg?resize=682%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 682w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/B84V1827t1-elderley-man-past-gravestones.jpeg?resize=200%2C300&amp;ssl=1 200w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/B84V1827t1-elderley-man-past-gravestones.jpeg?resize=768%2C1153&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/B84V1827t1-elderley-man-past-gravestones.jpeg?w=1359&amp;ssl=1 1359w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 682px) 100vw, 682px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Short answer: NO! One of the infuriating things I come across is the notion that final salary pension schemes are generous; it seems that a generation of Tory propaganda has persuaded people that such schemes were wildly over-generous and completely affordable. Of course many of those doing the persuading are taking advantage of those &#8220;generous&#8221; <a href='https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=4530' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[1608,1514,305,176],"class_list":["post-4530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-final-salary","tag-looting","tag-pensions","tag-tory","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-1b4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4530"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4537,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4530\/revisions\/4537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}