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So how does this work Colin?

!is problem can begin to be tackled
by an act of intergenerational solidarity between those baby boomers
born before the mid-1960s to start supporting younger job seekers
through investing some of their pensions and other private savings
in a massive labour-intensive, energy-saving programme, with the
repayments coming from the resulting lower energy bills.

People pay lower energy bills. This finances the capital required how?

If people pay the same energy bills but use less energy then I can see how the capital expenditure gets a return. But I really don\’t see how lower energy bills will finance more capital expenditure.

12 thoughts on “So how does this work Colin?”

  1. I wouldn’t trust anyone who uses words like “solidarity” and “massive” in describing economic policy. A sure sign of lefty lunacy.

  2. I ‘think’ (without a link to original article), that he means that he wants pensioners with savings to be ‘encouraged’ to effectively give them to the State to fund this new energy scheme, and all they get in return is lower ‘leccy bills.

    Well f*ck him and the horse he rode in on.

  3. I’ve got an idea: Build treadmills attached to turbines, get the unemployed to earn their keep generating electricity.

  4. Intergenerational solidarity? From the boomers? That’s a laugh. We’re talking about the single most selfish generation in history here.

    The solution to the boomers’ greed is simple: raise their retirement age to 78+, and tax all pension income (or substitutes) at 99% if they retire before that age. Sort the balance sheet out in no time if we removed the unfunded pensions they promised themselves.

    Instead, we get the usual whinging, as here, that they’re being asked to pay even a very small amount towards their share of the bills.

  5. When did baby boomer generation end in ’66 and not ’56?

    Born in ’56 I’d always assumed I was a the tail of the baby boomerq generation.

    I have some sympathy with dave.

    Tim adds: American and English maybe? The US “baby boom” definitely ended earlier than the UK one. I’m a 63’er and that was tail end UK, but past it for US.

  6. The group that had Voluntary Service Overseas instead of a gap year holiday, that turned Oxfam from a local hope in a university city to a worldwide force, that made “volunteering” a normal feature of corporate life, that created more charities than any previous one in history is “the single most selfish generation in history”?
    Dave is simply talking nonsense. I can’t actually say ROFL because it just isn’t funny.
    Firstly, the large majority of baby boomers have funded pensions which come from investing contributions made by themselves and their employers, both of which reduced their cash incomes in their younger years. The number of baby boomers with unfunded pensions is insignificant since the Civil Service was much smaller in the sixties and seventies when they started work.
    Secondly, the real income of every single younger cohort has been significantly higher than the 46-56 baby boomers at every age. This is shown dramatically in the graphs the Financial Times used to show that the most recent cohort of graduates was the first since the 1930s to have lower incomes than the preceding cohort.
    Thirdly, a lot of said baby boomers have been subsidising their children’s attempts to get on the housing ladder for some years
    Fourthly as the baby boomers start reaching 65 the number who are postponing retirement because they can’t afford not to do so has hit record levels. Some of this is a result of the halving of annuity rates since Brown became Chancellor to ease the problem of a few million younger people who have *selfishly* spent money that have neither got nor earned which follows on from a worse-than-halving of the value of our savings under the 1974-9 Labour government when we also had a pay cut in real terms.
    Dave seems to think that consumers borrowing and spending a Trillion pounds under Blair/Brown isn’t the problem – it must be all be the fault of those of us who grew with rationing so we don’t waste as much as his generation.

  7. Some global additions to John’s excellent list:
    The group of men and women that:
    – Freed women.
    – Freed most of the world from communism.
    – Enriched said world with a cornucopia of technologies (e.g. S Jobs, W Gates, both 1955).

  8. Thanks Thomas, although I wasn’t going to claim any of those as solely due to my generation – Lady Thatcher and President Reagan are both older than I and I have always reckoned that the work that my father and some of his friends did in improving fertiliser production did a damn sight more to reduce human misery than IBM, Gates and Jobs put together.
    Your point about giving women, globally, something nearer a fair chance in life is possibly more important than all my points put together.

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