"Pensioners have done pretty well out of the system and their tendancy to vote means they're largely protected by Governments of all colours."

Having paid into the system for 48 years I receive from the state 142.60 certainly live like a king on that.If I had paid the into a German system I would recieve a minimum of 1240€ a month.I would say there has been in the UK a gross mis management of the fund over many years.Far from the pensioners doing well I would say they are treated with contempt.

You say they're treated with contempt but the Government still pays out £140billion a year on pensions. Reliable estimates say the over 65s take up 40% of the NHS budget which is another £32billion. Throw in winter fuel payments, elderly care bills and all other bits and bobs and you can conservatively say at least a quarter of public spending is on pensioners.

My point is the public finances are in such a state that we may not be able to stick to our old principles of what someone deserves or should get. Pensioners will say they deserve x and y for paying in for so many years, but with Social Security outspending the National Insurance take by £3 to £1, we may not be able to stick to those ideas. The system has clearly failed and was probably never intended to last into the 21st century in the first place.

The Foreign Aid budget is just under £10billion. This Government has even increased it since coming to office. That should mostly be cut as well but don't think cutting £10bn off foreign aid means we have £10bn to give to pensioners. The reality is we need to cut pensioner provision AND foreign aid (and an awful lot else, frankly.)

Not sending £50million a day to the European Union would be a decent start.

What about big bussiness not paying the taxess they should.

Well this has become a big thing very recently despite big multinationals having been transfering profits to low tax countries for decades. Look, if Starbucks (as an example) were doing anything illegal they'd be up front of a Judge, not Margaret Hodge. Though we should stress what they're doing isn't rubberstamped legal either.

some people having to work far to long to sustain a decent living is not the answer in my opinion

'Far too long' is a matter of opinion. I think the 65 retirement age is out of date as even yourself at 63 have a halfway realistic chance of living another 30 years if you're somewhat healthy. Raising retirement age to 70 is not unreasonable given the surge in life expectancy.

I rather see more young people having the change to start in the workplace.

Yes so would I. I think this whole idea of sending half of youngsters to University, charging them for it and them not starting work until their 20s is absolute madness. I'm also unconvinced about raising the school leaving age to 18.

A massive problem many small companies have though is with employment law; the red tape attached to employing someone is frankly bonkers and I've spoken to many small business owners who say they're not taking anyone else on because they can't afford the £5k payout at tribunal when they need to sack them. Hence why they prefer very experienced, older people with a long list of references who present far less risk.

If we relaxed those rules and got just 20% to take on a school leaver, give them 6 months sweeping up and making the tea to put on their CV just imagine what a boost that'd give. But this is not an either-or debate Dutchie. It's going to take all of these things.

Nobody is talking about breadlines here. We set up the welfare state to stop people joining breadlines when they were too old to work and it's our responsibility to stop it going bankrupt and people returning to that.

The 'responsibility for your future' argument is an always an interesting one. You can say a wide ranging welfare state which guarantees you almost everything in your old age means you're less likely to bother saving for it yourself. It also contributes to the feeling of many pensioners forced to sell their homes that 'those who didn't bother working got it all for free.'

Likewise a nation of habitual savers is never going to kickstart any economy, the problem is our spending went so reckless we're now hampered by debt. When people talk about the 'worlds richest nations' what they really mean is worlds most indebted nations. The US national debt is over $16trillion. They're not a rich country. They're an in debt country.

savers are abused with low interest rates...the government protect the feckless who borrowed too much at the expense of the investor with ridiculously low interest rates...

First off the Government doesn't control interest rates and hasn't done so since 1997 but don't forget this stuff goes two ways; for every reckless borrower there was a reckless lender and I didn't see banks complaining when the free money taps were on.

A return to rates if 5% with encourage savers to spend and release cash back into the economy.

It will also trigger defaults on a nationwide scale and plunge the country back into recession with a strong fall of confidence to boot. Not sure it's worth it to get our hands on the £5.60 in your jam jar.

the youth of today, rather than aspiring to achieve what their thrifty forbears have done, simply grow envious and suggest that the old should support poor younger generation

Excuse me the financial crisis was not caused by 19 year olds. It was that same generation - which I presume to be your own - you describe as the thrifty forbears who are responsible for the mess we find ourselves in today.

It was your generation who voted for an innumerate Labour Government three times in a row. Your generation engineered an extremely generous final-salary-pension scheme which relied on my generation dying at 31 to keep viable. When your generation went to buy a house in the 1980s it was reasonably obtainable yet your same generation did extremely well out of the false property boom which rendered house buying a distant dream for todays youngsters. Your generation were running tiny banks/building societies lending 125% mortgages of 9 times the borrowers salary just before the crash hit.

You're the generation who engineered everything your own way but from reasonable mortgages and free university tuition right through to minor perks like being allowed to tow a trailer without training, you don't want the younger generation to have all the fun you did. You feel they're less deserving than you and they should work harder than you did and be grateful you've burned the bottom of several ladders for them.

I didn't say it was easy, I said 'reasonably obtainable.' It was probably easier in the 1980s rather than the 1970s which you're referring to. Days when people could either get paid grants to attend University - rather than leave with £27k of debt like todays students - or had a realistic chance of getting a job after leaving school. Smart planning was enough to obtain a house because house prices were not as bonkers as they are now.

Another side of the credit boom we don't discuss is downward pressure on wages. Credit was invented as a means to get the peasants spending more without the oligarchs having to lose some of their own money in the process, so many are still being paid the same amount of pounds today as they were in 2003.

As far as politics goes, one look at the numbers will show you election turnout has gone through the floor since the days of Tony Blair. 1997 was the last election with a turnout higher than 70%. Even 2010 failed to coax two-thirds of the electorate to the polling station, despite the worst economic meltdown since the late 1920s. People are realising the European Union makes the big decisions, we're masters of very little now and if that wasn't bad enough - all our main parties are identical anyway.

I don't read newspapers.