Nothing close to the size of the transfer from poor & middle class to the very, very rich.

"This is exactly how the old are eating the young."

The wealthy are explicitly trying to create a divide between young and old precisely so that the old can be relied upon to offer no resistance to student loan increases that soak the young while the young can be relied upon to offer no resistance to cuts to pensions and elderly care.

If young people are complicit in this game of divide and conquer they'll ultimately only hurt themselves.

And 80% of the country's wealth is with the 60+ crowd (this is getting worse, if anyone has stats that include 2015 / 2016 it'd be appreciated). As they've got both greater wealth and income than the young, and this is getting worse, I think it'd be foolish to call the problem a distraction.

Sure, provided the title was changed to "the rich are eating the young and the old are doing slightly better than the young".

I don't think that was the impression they were trying to give though.

The middle and working classes are much less powerful political bloc if they are fighting each another (young/old). Hence the steady flow of articles like this one pitting "boomers" against "millenials" and vice versa.

The provision of decent pensions, free education and social welfare was affordable in the 50s-80s when the country was much poorer and the idea that it has become less affordable because we live slightly longer after many decades of massive economic growth is, to put it bluntly, economically illiterate. The money is there.

The GDP per capita, by contrast, has increased 300% in 2005 adjusted dollars.

This is the metric that answers the question "why are pensions deemed unaffordable?", not birth/aging/death rates:

http://retired.talkingpointsmemo.com/images/productivity.png

Now, you might say, well they got a very expensive kind of illness, and so they should pay for it, because someone has to pay for it.

But, applying the "veil of ignorance" test, of not knowing whether you or your family will be struck by such a disease in the future, it would seem a system where everyone effectively pays insurance to guard against the highly negative outcome would be fairest and most sensible outcome.

I see parallels to the current healthcare fight in America, which seems to take advantage of people's strong belief that "it won't happen to me" to form policy, rather than actual statistics and a general right wing antipathy to these kinds of solutions. I guess it's easier to sell potential bankruptcy to people when they're young and healthy than a 100% certain tax rise.

It was nick-named 'the dementia tax', although that aspect of it was only half accurate, it depends on whether the case was severe enough to need to go into a care home.

Residential care (in a care home) already has to be paid for by the person receiving it. The difference is that now you have to pay the money up front until your assets go down to £23k, which usually means being forced to sell any property to release funds, whereas this bill increased the limit to £100k, and postponed payment so that it came out of your estate after death.

The major change was that care in your own home was going to be subject to the same system, whereas at the moment it is paid for by the state, albeit only available patchily. But a lot of this in-home care is going to be quite limited, I remember with my own grandparents the major help they received was someone coming in to give a bath once a week. That was probably only about £30 a week (£1500 a year) in costs, frankly it would have been better if they had received more care, and more money had come out of their property. If you are the child, and you begrudge £20-100k coming out of your inheritance so that your elderly relatives can be properly looked after, I don't exactly sympathize.

I agree with you about the insurance aspect of it, and that was what was recommended by a cross-party (that is, bipartisan) commission. The problem I see with that is that inheritance taxes are very unpopular, and the more you sever the link between the tax, and the thing that is being paid for, the more that people will object. But I agree that is what should happen, let's hope this 'dementia tax' label doesn't stick to those efforts as well.

And yet, the young overwhelmingly voted for it! A paradox no?

Ok, that's got to be the weirdest mental gymnastics I've seen for justifying rich old people running the world. I'm also suspicious that's it actually true because I'm sure a lot of houses changed hands in the US housing crisis, and it probably went to real estate brokers who decided to rent instead of sell even after getting a bunch of houses in the firesale.

Even if old people realized those gains by selling their house (and going where?), it's not going to be enough money that they'd go out and start buying a bunch of other houses and charging outrageous rent. Certainly not enough to lord over sprawling apartment complexes filled with a bunch of millennial wage slaves.

Maybe, maybe someone in California bought a house for like 50k and turned it into life-changing millions, but to imply that's a massive transfer of wealth for entire countries is disingenuous.

You're right in the sense that it isn't just a transfer of wealth to the elderly, it's a transfer of wealth to home owners, particularly in the prosperous parts of the country, and in the long run to their families. In the short term that's correlated although not matched to young/old, and it gets more and more fuzzy the further into the future you go.

Ironically in effect the left wing party just made a lot of political headway by allying with the right-wing tabloids to protect this inherited wealth against being used for care of the elderly. There are better ways of organizing it, but I didn't hear much nuance in the campaign against it, and I wouldn't be surprised if all policies even vaguely similar are now dead in the water.

It's also in reference to the UK, where publicly owned housing was sold off to tenants in the 80s at below market rates, and housing markets have been booming ever since.

Petty sure 8 or 9 years of "emergency" low interest rates have had an effect in preventing the otherwise inevitable crash in prices.