I don’t understand this level of economics but I’d like to and I’d like Will Hutton to expand on what he finds important about the 3.5% discount rate. I am a tax-payer and I pay national insurance, I also pay into a workplace pension and expect to be paid both state and private pensions within a couple of years. For me “30 years” is a lifetime – if I’m lucky!
Here is the question being discussed. To me is whether what I’m paying into my private pensions or what I’m paying in taxes, going to mean for my children and their children. My guess this is what political economist Will Hutton is tickling his chin about, what Amarvir Singh-Bal is bringing our attention to, what is being discussed behind Treasury doors and what matters to engineering firms like Hatch who will be delivering the infrastructure we as individuals and collectively sponsor.
“Entrepreneurs with a technical soul“, that’s how Amarvir’s firm describe themselves and my thinking is that this kind of dive into the fundamentals of how we finance our country’s development is something that we ought to know about.
This is our money that is being spent on the future and which pots, which streams of taxation or pension contributions are being assigned to the projects under consideration are matters of interest to anyone who pays taxes or saves for their long-term future.
The review will be carried out over the next 6 months and the findings will influence how our pension investment managers spend our savings on investment, how the Government spends our taxes. This from the review annjouncement (above)
So what does this mean to ordinary people?
So Mr Will Hutton and Mr Amarvir Singh-Bal , can you help ordinary people who aren’t political economists but need to better understand how Britain’s development is financed.
What does this mean to our gilts market? What about infrastructure funds for private pensions? What will our great DB and DC schemes do that tax-payers won’t?