[sefrost]

> There's no easy way out of this. One generation will effectively have to give up their welfare, but nobody wants to do this (understandable). The UK cannot afford to be the welfare state it wants to be.

It can be done over a period of time. Canada moved from a non-funded pension model like the UK currently has, to a partially funded model which currently has over $731 billion in assets.

They began this change in 1999. If they hadn't made that change in direction they'd be in a much worse situation today.

It's possible to change from one system to another, if a government is able to look much further ahead than its own term in government.

With the Canadian model, your payments out at the end are tied to what you put in. Which is not quite the case in the UK, which allows extremely low payments in for just 10 years to get a very high amount out indefinitely.

The British government must take the same path the Canadians took.