Here’s why you think you’re getting richer when in fact you’re getting poorer
Relative values: older people think the young are richer than them because they’re paid in pounds rather than pennies – but inflation means those pounds don’t pay for as much as the pennies did and, in real terms, younger people are paid less than their senior counterparts were at the same age.
Here’s why you think you’re getting richer when in fact you’re getting poorer – as laid out in simple terms by Gary Stevenson.
He has released a video clip explaining why older generations are mistaken in claiming younger people “never had it so good”, to quote Harold Macmillan.
While it is true that young people may start their working lives earning more money – in pounds and pence – than older people did, the simple fact of inflation means the pounds they are paid simply doesn’t go as far as the pennies their elders received.
But the fact that – on paper – they are receiving more means employers can pay them less in real terms and claim they’re being over-generous – and get away with it because people look at the simple numbers rather than the real-terms value.
Here’s Gary:
The theory Gary puts forward is proved by the fact that, after World War II, a single earner was able to buy the mortgage on a house and pay the living costs of everybody living in it – no matter how big the family, and now everybody of working age has to be slaving away all the hours they can work, and still can’t make ends meet.
But the UK as a nation is not getting poorer – either in money terms or real terms.
This means the cash that would have gone to working people in the post-war era is now going somewhere else. Gary says it’s going to the rich and that makes perfect sense because rich people own the companies that employ working people and can therefore dictate how their firms’ profits are divided.
It is these rich people who are impoverishing the vast majority of us in the UK – and getting away with it by lying that we are actually getting richer, generation by generation, when in fact the action of inflation and the wage stagnation they inflict on us mean that we are actually getting poorer.
The answer is for government to tax the rich so that these pay policies make them no better-off, or to impose laws that demand a maximum ratio between the highest-paid and lowest-paid in any business.
Neither of the main political parties seem interested in this. We may speculate about the reasons for this – is big business holding politicians to ransom: “Keep our salaries high and wages low or there’ll be no cushy job waiting for you after you get voted out”? – but it won’t make any real difference. It is what it is.
We see that in Labour’s new ‘campaigning bible’, that is full of soundbites and empty of initiative.
From what This Writer has seen, it contains nothing that could possibly induce a member of the voting public to conclude that a Labour government will improve their standard of living.
The reason for that is simple: it doesn’t address the issues facing us – like the illusion of improvement that Gary has identified.
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