>>>And presumably, because you'd been fortunate enough not to have an illness that depleted your savings.
>
>If they moved from the UK the gummint would have taken care of that anyway.
>
>The reality is that much of the previous generation's wealth came about through property inflation, not personal prowess. Certainly some properties in the UK doubled or tripled in value in a few years, meaning that any property owner could feel rich if they moved to the US.
>
>The other side of that coin is that during inflationary times, every dollar invested to cover future needs in a scheme like Medicare will also multiply, increasing future benefits or reducing future obligations. You only have to look at the Australian Superannuation scheme to see how that works. To underfund is a fatal error: every dollar scooped away for private wealth creates a far greater debt obligation downstream- currently $47T and rising for Medicare.

I think the above is a slanted view of things. Property inflation is just the effect of flooding the markets with central bank money.
This is done to reduce interest levels to ranges needed now as deficits are approaching 1GDP when averaged -
interest levels are still way beyond those seen late last century and accepted back then.

And another branch from same tree: How could those $ be "invested" by insurance ?
Gov is *forcing* insurance to buy gov bonds through higher capitalization rules
for all investments able to hedge against inflation and will devalue the buying power of their own debt
which insurance has to buy according to new rules. And then somewhen in the future even those "safe"
gov bonds will default leaving insured persons holding the short end. Ponzi scheme all over, with some finesse added.