Pension cuts brainwave is like Dickens meets Yes Minister

I REFER to your article “NHS charges call to defuse debts timebomb” (The Yorkshire Post, October 29).

Here we have a smiling Philip Booth, Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) suggesting that to get a grip of the national debt the state pension should be reduced, the minimum annual increase slashed and the state retirement age substantially increased.

Easy, why not increase the starting age for the state pension to 80? That way many folk will have died through overwork anyway, thereby to quote Dickens “reducing the surplus population”. No discrimination here, immigrants included.

I have an alternative solution. Why not make the affluent forego their state pension, hike up the income tax levy for those receiving (not earning) over £100,000 pa and impose an extra charge for those useless individuals who neither fulfil any useful function or actually produce goods of any kind.

This article smacks of having been dreamed up by Jim Hacker when he headed “the Department of Administrative Affairs” in Yes Minister.

From: Geoff Sweeting, Wressle, Selby.

HAS anyone done the maths? I keep reading about our nanny state and in particular the money spent trying to save people from themselves.

Our economy is in a mess and yet we spend millions trying to keep alive people who are trying to kill themselves by a lack of exercise, smoking, over eating and drinking too much.

There are two main benefits to tolerating over-indulgence and saving all this money. Firstly, that this section of our society is likely to die earlier than the more abstemious, and therefore the taxpayer will not have to fund their pensions for long, if at all. Secondly, the Government will receive larger tax income from all the extra food, drink and cigarettes smoked.

I am in favour of the smoking ban in public places and I admit that this might place a strain on the NHS, but surely the extra tax revenue will counteract this problem – has anyone done the maths?

What is happening at present is that tax revenues are down, we have a massive deficit as well as huge debts, people are living longer, the country is over-populated and the NHS is at breaking point.

I think that it is time for some radical thinking on how to reduce our Government’s spend. Perhaps George Osborne could do the maths?