Life used to be so easy. At the age of 65 you retired with a nice carriage clock and went home to spend your pension on potting plants and pipe tobacco. Then, 10 years later, you died.

Now things are very different. You retire at 63 and go home to spend your pension on kickboxing classes and cocaine. You have no plans to die at all.

This, as I’m sure you read last week, is having a dramatic effect on pensions. The country can afford to keep its senior citizens in old shag for 10 years but not coke for 30. Not when the number of retired people exceeds the number working.

As a result, the young people of today have been told to expect some harsh changes. They will have to save 30% of what they earn and hand over 70% to the government. They will be expected to work down the mines until the age of 127 and even then they will be expected to die, in poverty, in a puddle of vomit.

Stern-faced men are saying the country must find an extra £57 billion a year for pensions by 2050 if old people are to enjoy the same standard of living that they have today.

It all sounds very gloomy, but £57 billion is nothing. We learnt last week that the government has spent £30 billion on a computer system for the NHS. In the past few months I’ve watched Oxford council spend what must have been £57 billion inserting bollards to make life harder for motorists, then taking them away, then building them again.

Thanks to changes made by Margaret Thatcher in 1979 we’re going to fall short of the pensions bill by only 5%. In France they’ll miss it by 105%. In Germany it’ll be 110%. Then there’s the United States.

I read a book by Niall Ferguson while on holiday this year. It’s called Colossus, it’s about the American empire and it argues that already the gap between what America has and what it needs to keep its old people in burgers is $45 trillion.

Now I don’t know what a trillion is but I do know that $45 trillion is roughly 10 times more than the total combined wealth of Germany, France, Italy and Britain. It seems there are three ways this vast deficit can be covered: they can either increase taxes, immediately, by 69% or cut medicare benefits by more than a half, or stop all federal purchases for ever.

I haven’t seen either John Kerry or George W Bush suggest they’ll be doing any of these things. And that’s bad news because the situation is becoming more critical. If nothing has happened by 2008, taxes will have to go up by 74%.

No president, of course, will ever impose any such increase, which means that with the certainty of Titanic’s fate once it had hit the iceberg, America will go spectacularly bankrupt. It is, according to the author, an inescapable fact.

Long before that happens, however, the US will renege on all its foreign debt which will bankrupt the entire world, causing famine and maybe even some kind of holocaust. So you’ll look a bit of a Charlie if you’ve spent the previous 40 years squirrelling away £30 a week for your old age.

This is the fundamental problem with pensions. You are saving for a future you don’t yet know. You’re taking care of something that might never happen — your old age. You could live a life of thrift and then, the day before your pension matures, you could be trampled to death by a horse. Or win £17m on the lottery. Or watch America go bust, taking the International Monetary Fund and your pension fund with it.

What’s more, how do you know that the people you entrust with your savings will look after them wisely? How do you know they won’t raid the fund, spend it on a boat and then jump off? Every night commercial television is littered with multi- million-pound advertisements for pension companies. That’s your money — your nest egg — they are spending, trying to attract more suckers so they can build a taller, shinier office block. From which they can plan more adverts.

The government’s no better. If ministers take our money, saying we can have it back when we’re old, how do we know they won’t give it all to Oxford council so it can knock over bollards to make way for new ones? Believing that the chancellor will have a special ring-fenced fund to be spent only on pensions is as silly as thinking your road tax is spent on the roads. It isn’t. It’s spent on new NHS computers and, of course, on the civil service, which I see now employs more people than live in the city of Sheffield.

Of course they’ll be fine. They are on the I’m All Right Jack Civil Service Pension Fund. But what about you? Well, I suggest you buy something stupid like a plasma television and sit in front of it with a big Twix and packet of killer fags.

Because do you want to end up poor in a bankrupt world full of civil servants? Thought not.

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone