Difficult Choices with No Fairy Tale Ending Turner Warns Magic-Wand Approach Won't Help Brown Analysis

Summary

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NOW that we have the Pensions Commission's report in full and not just the bits the fairy godmother - sorry, Gordon Brown - wanted to banish in advance, the debate on the hard choices that lie ahead can commence.

Lord Turner acknowledges the proposals his commission has assembled contain "difficult issues of affordability". But he is clearly not prepared to see debate on its core trade-off - between the state spending more of our money on "an adequate and largely non- means-tested state pension", from 2010 onwards, and some gradual rise in the state pension age from 2030 - stifled from the start.

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Extract

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Difficult Choices with No Fairy Tale Ending Turner Warns Magic-Wand Approach Won't Help Brown Analysis

"Unless people are willing to discuss it, they are not serious participants in this debate. They are indulging in fairy-tale economics - in which a fairy godmother makes all difficult choices disappear, " he warned. How the cries of "ouch"must have echoed all round the Treasury at t...

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