you are easily wound up arent you?
I am so sorry I upset you.
I have apologised , do you still want me to stay fucked off or do you want to debate?
Thank-you for your apology. Yes, you did upset me.
You said, "you didn't really address the points". I didn't have time to pick through it line by line since I was going out shortly. My reply at the time was "sure mate - good points". I further went on to say that of course we cannot get everyone into highly skilled work and necessarily we will have to accommodate some low paid jobs, for which I think the least worst option is to subsidize their pay with benefits. So I am not exactly sure what more you want me to say.
To recap, my position is this:
1. You cannot simply pay people more, and in the case of the unskilled and very low paid, much more than they would earn in a free market system, since it would burden the employer too much and the goods and services produced would no longer be competitive and businesses would go bust. Customers would buy cheaper imported product instead, or stop buying the product altogether. It would put people out of work.
The average pub makes around 7p a pint on beer. Put wages up to £10/h and beer becomes £6 a pint or whatever, and more pubs would shut.
2. You could lob a load of money at employers to enable them to pay more (quite the opposite of Jeremy's plans), but how would that work? What would be the moral justification for taxing everyone in the country more, in order to subsidize the likes of Mike Ashley. I think that's a non-starter. Employers could deliberately pay less, knowing they'd get a hand out. Doesn't work.
3. We could ban cheap imports. This does not work, full stop. It depresses the economy by making us pay more than we currently do for the same stuff. We have less disposable income, and the economy slumps. And we can't do it anyway until we leave the EU and depending on the deal, maybe we can't do it then either. And the exporting country would likely retaliate, wrecking our exports too. So everyone loses. Another non-starter.
4. Having ruled out 1,2 and 3 as being unworkable, the least worse option is to help the poorest with in work benefits. I can see no better alternative, but if you have one, I am all ears.
Clearly even 4 is not ideal and therefore it's important that we recognise this and strive to increase the number of skilled jobs in our economy and reduce the number of low paid unskilled ones. Obviously we'll always need some of these latter jobs, and we'll have to augment peoples' pay unless they work in industries where the pay can go up without putting the companies out of work. To get everyone off benefits, I don't know the numbers but I would imagine the minimum wage would have to be even higher than £10/h. Businesses such as farming just could not stand it, so we need to think of alternative approaches.
