Dan Liddicott
Midlands/Mercia Region Coordinator and Students/Youth Coordinator
Among all the drivel coming out of the Tory party conference there was at least one brief window of sanity. Ministry of Justice Under-Secretary of State, Dr. Philip Lee MP, admitted in a fringe event that our beloved NHS is actually funded as a Ponzi scheme as he questioned the morality of asking younger people today to keep paying for a service from which they may never benefit.
The BBC reported that ‘the Bracknell MP told the meeting how he had clashed with George Osborne in 2015 after he described the then chancellor’s pensioner bond scheme as “intergenerational theft” designed to woo older voters at the expense of younger people’.
‘He suggested it was not fair to tell the under-44s who were “struggling” with a family: “‘Oh, by the way, we’re also going to tax you even more because this Ponzi scheme that we’ve had in play for pensions and for healthcare and for social care for the past 30 years is about to collapse. So therefore we want you to work really, really hard, but when you get to 65, it’s not going to be there.’ Hands up who thinks that’s a really compelling narrative?”‘ (BBC, 2 Oct 2017)
A damning assessment he’s since tried to row back on somewhat, but in actual fact he’s quite right. The welfare state, in fact, state funding as a whole, is a Ponzi scheme – so groaning under its own weight – that successive tranches of new payees cannot provide enough tax to support it all. (more…)
