Tuesday 21 December 2010

Where have all the young ones gone?


Twenty years ago, one mortgage borrower in five was under 25. Today, that number has fallen to little over one in sixteen.

The vast majority of young people simply can not afford to buy property. Instead, the housing market has become the domain of the middle aged and retired.

I suspect that this exclusion will have dire consequences for the current beneficiaries of the UK housing scam. Those property-liberated youngsters will soon be the backbone of the UK tax base. I wonder whether today's under-25s will be willing to hand over a large part of their earnings to finance the pensions of undeserving property owners.

Methinks not.

7 comments:

Lorne said...

By then, the increasingly harsh winters will have killed most of the pensioners off, and there won't be a problem.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Me also thinks not.

This whole land 'ownership' thing is just state-sanctioned theft (it's like income tax, but in the other direction). With theft, you need a perp and a vic. The perps are those who were there first to get all the rules and propaganda in place, so clearly it's the older generations doing the thieving.

And the vic's are the younger people (who will be just as bad themselves once they are old enough to be in charge).

dearieme said...

Won't the youngsters eventually inherit property from the oldsters?

Anonymous said...

Yes, the youngsters will inherit the property. However, that could be 30 years away when the youngsters are more like oldsters. In the meantime, they will be struggling to pay the taxes that fund a lavish lifestyles of their property owning parents.

Anonymous said...

Ownership is like thief haha.

Actually ownership came about due to tribes 2000 years + ago fighting over territory, the biggest strongest tribe 'owned' the most land.


The modern form of ownership I feel its much most civilised than knocking each other over the head with an axe!

That the older generation own most of the land and property is nothing new.

The problem is due to this country being over populated causing land price to be at a premium.
Japan has a similar problem only worse.
What we need is a balance immigration policy.

Anonymous said...

Anon 02:58. Your arguement isn't only against property but also against the other redistributions of wealth to the older generation.
About 1 quarter of the whole UK government budget goes into Pensions and Welfare. (much of that Welfare not needed if it wasn't of the extortionate price of property).

Part of the reason owners get a disproportionate share of the wealth is the money system that inflates away what the workers earn, that also makes assets more expensive for workers to buy..

Alice Cook said...

I can't help thinking that there will be a day of reckoning for those smug property owning oldies.