Tag Archives: Pension

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Britain’s Office for National Statistics predicts looming demographics crisis

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Here’s an article from MercatorNet. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Britain is bracing itself for the ageing of its population with the latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that the proportion of people aged over 65 is set to rise dramatically.

[…]The fastest growing age group has been been 85-and-over group –now referred to as the “oldest old”. This group has doubled to 1.3 million since the early ’80s;

By 2033 the number of people aged 85 and over is projected to more than double again to reach 3.2 million. It will grow to will account for five per cent of the total population;

The article is filled with statistics about the increasing number of retired seniors. In Western countries, seniors depend on the government social programs for pensions and health care. A lot of countries had a baby boom in the 50s and 60s so that a large number of of people are retiring. Unfortunately, due to feminism and the sexual revolution, the numbers of new workers has been decimated by hedonism, the breakdown of the family and abortion. So who is going to pay the income taxes needed to provide for the larger number of retirees?

Today, there just aren’t enough new workers to pay for all the social programs. Either the younger generation will have to be impoverished by high tax rates, or the older generation will have to be denied health care. In one sense this actually just, because the same generation of people that introduced their children to feminism is going to face the consequences of their worldviews. Young people were taught hedonism and that sex is recreational. Saving money and having children took a back seat to careers and having a good time here and now.

When a person expects to be taken care of by the government, they don’t save their own money and they worry about having more children to take care of them in their old age. The government started the whole wealth distribution game in order to equalize the life outcomes of people who worked and saved to pay for their own retirement and health care, with those who didn’t work and save. This caused those who were working and saving to slow down or stop, since it was now the government’s job to take care of people.

I also think it is interesting that the left-wingers who complained about “overpopulation” are going to finally find out exactly how badly they miscalculated. There is one group of people still having lots of babies. Muslims. And when they become the voting majority, a lot of multiculturalists will be surprised to see their liberties vanishing. In particular, special interest groups on the left, e.g. – feminists, will have their liberties curtailed. And so, feminism will have set in motion demographic forces that led to its own destruction.

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Are teacher unions interested in helping your children to succeed in life?

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This is a great article from the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Club for Growth)

Excerpt:

In her weekly “What Matters Most” newspaper column, Randi Weingarten recently bid the Big Apple farewell. Ms. Weingarten has been elevated to president of the national American Federation of Teachers from head of its New York City affiliate, and she had some notable parting words: “One of the most rewarding (and exhausting) things about working in public education in New York City is that it is the best laboratory in the world for trying new things.”

Well, it could be, if it weren’t for Ms. Weingarten’s union. Since taking over in 1998, she has done everything she could to block significant reforms to New York’s public schools. Take her opposition to charter schools. She resisted raising the state cap on charters from 100 unless the union could organize them. (She lost and the cap now is 200.)

Ms. Weingarten was also against merit pay for individual teachers. She supported a law that bars school districts from linking teacher tenure to student test scores. In return for even the mildest pension reforms, Ms. Weingarten recently won a concession that teachers no longer need to work on the two days before the start of the school year. Meanwhile, she has fought to ensure that the Absent Teacher Reserve Pool keeps allowing teachers whom no principal wants to hire to receive their full salaries. New York spends an estimated $150 million on this and on Teacher Reassignment Centers (for instructors who have been accused of misconduct) alone.

Speaking of money, Ms. Weingarten has long been among the union leaders claiming that more cash will fix public education. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has paid for the modest reforms he’s been able to implement by increasing spending to $22 billion from $13 billion, much of that in teacher salaries. The four-year high school graduation rate in New York City is now 56%. In union politics, results like these are how you win a promotion to national leadership.

I blogged before about the NYC teachers removed from their duties who are still being paid.

But there’s more to it than that. My Christian readers should also be aware that teacher’s unions, like most unions (but not all!), are also very interested in promoting left-wing, anti-family social programs. (Weingarten herself is openly gay)

If you missed my post about Obama’s appointment of a gay activist to be the director of “safe schools”, check it out here.

The take-home lesson for you is not to vote for Democrats just because they say they will spend more money on education. What Democrats really mean is that they will spend more money on teacher’s unions, so that the teachers can turn around and advocate for leftist policies, like abortion and same-sex marriage, using union dues.