Tuesday, 29 October 2024

Below The Minimum

The national minimum wage goes back to 1998. It has increased since then, but by nothing like the increase in economic output per hour worked in the United Kingdom; in short, productivity. This is underpayment on a colossal scale, and underpayment is theft.

When the minimum wage goes up by 77p per hour, then 15.4p will be deducted from that in income tax, and 6.16p in employee's National Insurance contributions. There will be a tapered deduction of up to 55 per cent in Universal Credit, and a fiscal drag of 2.5p due to the freezing of the Personal Allowance. So a full-time worker on minimum wage will keep fully 22 of those 77 pennies. £1.76 per day.

But wait. Her bus fare will be going up by two pounds per day, one pound to get her to work and one pound to get her home, leaving her 24p per day worse off even before things like the huge increase in energy costs, all under a Labour Government that had inherited an economy that had grown by £29 billion in the first six months of 2024, after which growth in Gross Domestic Product has simply ceased.

8 comments:

  1. Bringing the fire, Mr. L.

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  2. “Yesterday, the 10 year government bond yield surpassed that of the Truss-Kwarteng mini-Budget which Labour claimed was evidence of the Tories’ crashing the economy.

    “This was in spite of similar trends globally, whereas this time, the value of British government debt is falling while that of other major nations is rising.

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    1. Had there ever been a Commons Division on the mini-Budget, then the Labour Whip would have been to abstain. Yet the mere suggestion of the mini-Budget crashed the economy, but Labour pretended to oppose only one measure in it, the one that Liz Truss had not included in her prospectus to Conservative Party members, while actively supporting all of the others. Look what those proposals did even without being enacted. Labour may very well now enact them.

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  3. “the mere suggestion of the mini-Budget crashed the economy,”

    It didn’t, that’s the point of my comment-the same trend in bond yields was happening globally at the time of Liz Truss but yesterday yields on 10-year UK government bonds have shot past the rate under Truss-Kwarteng; this time with a Chancellor pledging major tax rises. Proving definitely that Truss’s tax cuts had absolutely nothing to do with it.

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