Was there a single pandemic policy that wasn’t an unmitigated disaster? Outside of the odd, sane, jurisdiction like Sweden, North Dakota, or Florida, that is?
Lockdowns were a diabolical failure. Forced Covid vaccinations, ditto. Mass masking and school closures were frankly evil. The Covid surveillance/snitch state just as bad.
Economically, too, the unholy panic from governments is a disaster that’s still playing out. The delusion that governments could just “freeze” entire economies and nothing bad would come of it has and is been brutally exposed as a ludicrous fiction.
Now we learn that encouraging people to siphon away their superannuation savings or take early retirement was another time bomb.
Around 390,000 of the 50 to 70-year-olds who retired in 2020-21 are living in poverty, The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has revealed—meaning their annual income is below 60% of the average household.
“It is often assumed that older people who left the workforce during the pandemic were wealthy individuals retiring in comfort,” Xiaowei Xu, a senior research economist at IFS and author of the research, said.
“Our analysis shows that those who left in the first year of the pandemic experienced a sharp rise in poverty, despite overall poverty rates falling that year, and also suffered large falls in well-being.”
We’re generally used to thinking of retirees as loafing leeches, who contribute less to the tax pool, but suckerfish billions in welfare. Those who opted to retire early during Covid were often condemned as dropping out a “lifestyle choice”. It seems to have been about as much a “choice” as vaccination.
The IFS’s new research highlights the eye-opening reasons that forced older workers to toss in the towel on their careers.
The British economic think tank pointed to job losses during the early stages of the crisis, coupled with the additional health risks faced by older workers, as likely to have forced many people into early retirement.
And it’s not exactly the lifestyle that they would surely have imagined.
The researchers found that many older people who left work in the first year of the pandemic have had to cut their food expenditure by around £60 per week ($77) and had lower levels of well-being than previous cohorts of people who had recently stopped working.
Their health was worse than those who had been out of the workforce for much longer. Meanwhile, pre-pandemic retired workers didn’t have to substantially change their food expenditure upon leaving the workforce.
That’s because they did so by choice, when they had a decent retirement nest egg. Moronic government economic wrecking during the pandemic shoved more people than chose to jump.
Many quit without a state or private pension income to support them. So the researchers summarized that this suggests workers were forced to leave the workforce, as opposed to “retiring in comfort”.
In contrast, those who retired the year later during The Great Resignation, have enjoyed similar living standards and well-being to pre-pandemic retirees, suggesting that they were more likely to have left the workforce voluntarily and on more comfortable incomes.
So, the real “Long Covid” many countries are having to deal with is the fallout from the mad panic of the elites in 2020-21.
The size of Britain’s workforce in the wake of the pandemic has drastically staggered, largely because of long-term sickness and early retirement.
Now although some of this trend has been subsequently reversed as people are forced to return to work amid the cost of living crisis, the IFS warned that “older people who stop working often never re-enter the workforce”.
Yet, without the income of a pension income to support them, many of those pandemic retirees are witnessing their living standards and well-being being pushed down even further as the cost of living soars.
Fortune
You can bet, though, that neither the Jacinda Arderns, Matt Hancocks, Boris Johnsons or Dan Andrewses, let alone the Shaun Hendys, Ashleigh Bloomfields or Anthony Faucis, are scratching for a quid. This is what happens when the people with the least skin in the game are allowed to wreck the lives of everyone else.