In a world of increasingly more negative interest rates, one group is impacted more than most: pensioners who had relied on fixed income to fund their retirement years who are slowly discovering that as pension funds are unable to meet their annual 6-7% return target, that the pensions promised to them will never materialize, or worse cut by 50%, 60% or more.

One such example is that of the Central States Pension Fund whose fate we have been following over the past month, and which as we reported yesterday could see the pension benefits for about 407,000 people be reduced to “virtually nothing.”

In a last-ditch effort, the Central States Pension Plan sought government approval to partially reduce the pensions of 115,000 retirees and the future benefits for 155,000 current workers. The proposed cuts were steep, as much as 60% for some, but it wasn’t enough. Earlier this month, the Treasury Department rejected the plan because it found that it would not actually head off insolvency.

In this increasingly gloomy world for retirees everywhere, one person has come up with a modest proposal: the UK’s Lord Jonathan Adair Turner, Baron Turner of Ecchinswell, who based on his title hardly has to worried about his own personal retirement. Turner also happens to be the former chairman of the UK Pensions Commission, and as such his opinion will be closely followed.

What he said is the following: people should work until they are 70 and then be rewarded with a more generous state pension. He was referring specifically to Britons, but the same logic could be applied to the US pension system which is in just as dire shape.

Turner said that reforms to raise the state pension age should be accelerated, with retirement benefits staggered from the age of 65 before the introduction of a larger universal pension from the age of 70 by 2030.

“We have failed to think creatively,” he added.

Actually, no. The world’s central bankers thought very creatively in order to save equity investors around the globe. However, in the process they crushed returns on fixed income products, which are critical in funding and generating the much needed returns for pensioners. Of course, when it comes to actual priorities, the immediate capital gains needs of the 0.1% are far more pressing then long-term retirement benefits of the vast majority of workers, whose problems can be solved as simply as cutting their promised pension obligations by 60% (or more) or simply by forcing them to work until they die or just before.