After months of work did he:
A) Suggest that people pay for their own care and from a young age make preparations through saving and insurance to meet what will be an inevitable need for many in their lives.
or
B) Calm middle class childrens' fears that their "birthright" to an inheritance might have to be spent on caring for their parents.
The £35k contribution limit can only be seen as a sop to the middle class. The poor already have mountains of other peoples' thrown at them in direct proportion to their own fecklessness so the policy is irrelevant to them.
Where does the £35k limit come from? Is it a small enough percentage of the average house to sound reasonable? Nobody has any view on future inflation, none more that the Bank of England, so how do we know what the exposure to the taxpayer is of such a cap? We don't, and in a nation rapidly approaching a national debt of £1,000,000,000,000, it is reckless to promise a millionaire that potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds of their costs, will be pushed onto the working poor, so that their children will not lose too much of the money to which they feel entitled.
Another good example of how politics will override abstract political philsophy. There are 1.5 million people in the UK over the age of 85 and surely millions more in their 70s. This constitutes a formidable voting bloc at the next general election, and any notions that the middle class 'birthright' expectations of inheriting property are indeed a modern phenomenon will soon be forgotten as the political parties offer the long arm of the state to plug the gap.
ReplyDeleteAm I right to infer that millionaires will be entitled to apply for a contribution from the state after coughing up the maximum of £35,000 towards their care?
Nicely done MNN - yet another example of the culture we have of entitlement at the expense of others.
ReplyDeleteEveryone can now expect they and their kids to be born, fed, educated, housed, nursed and finally buried, all without any requirement for them to earn it themselves.
And people wonder why Britain is going down the fucking toilet?
Daz
Colonel
ReplyDeleteThe proposal is that the £35k cap applies to all.