Sir, – What a clever new concept has been devised, “intergenerational equity”, meaning in effect, tax more heavily pensioners who have a comfortable standard of living and deduct from pensioners who are in receipt of social welfare provisions.
Intergenerational enmity would be a more apt description for what is now going on.
Your columnist Stephen Collins (Opinion, September 15th) neatly juxtaposes “the young” and “their elders” as the punished and the privileged, in this relationship of “massive intergenerational inequity”, before extravagantly positing “devastating consequences for social cohesion and for democracy”, and so on in similar vein.
Pensioners were once the young and had to cope with and endure their own hardships and privations just as all the generations do. Their pensions and State benefits are entitlements and rewards for which they have contributed either monetarily or by giving service in the course of their working lives. To indiscriminately categorise pensioners as “their profligate elders” and “the generation who crashed the economy into the rocks” is a gross calumny and misrepresentation calculated to lend itself to the “consequences for social cohesion and for democracy” that your columnist by insinuation ascribes to them. – Yours, etc,