Take home pay from Minimum Wage

I do understand your opinion, I simply do not agree with it and you have failed to persuade me to your view point.

We have a young lad were I work who started at a different company and he got his job with us, in part, because of that job. If he had stayed at home on the dole instead of accepting a low paid job to get him started he would probably still be at home, on the dole.

One think I can guarantee you is that if you are unskilled or have outdated skills, sitting at home waiting for someone to pay you a so called "living wage" rather than getting out into the workplace means that is exactly where you are going to stay.

I am talking about starter jobs, not imaginary or misleading starter jobs - because they are not starter jobs. :o)

Reply to
Yellow
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No - what I call a sense of entitlement is exactly that.

Reply to
Yellow

There seem to be plenty of people who believe benefits are paid by the government and this understanding is not limited to non-tax payers and/or benefit claimants.

Reply to
Yellow

Children are a luxury, not a right.

Reply to
The Revd

OK. I got the wrong impression.

Well, bankers, we can all agree about. No-one likes them. (And if they can make such massive profits in a recession, they can only come from overcharging customers.)

Reply to
BartC

I can't remember the exact figures. But it was a fact that my disposable income was often less than that of someone on a much lower salary, but who already had all the essentials taken care of.

That means you can't say a particular salary is good or not without considering the circumstances.

I don't know about that..

The point is that there is a place for low-paid work.

Someone intending to keep a partner, family and house should be looking for something more suitable, rather than expect every menial job to pay enough to support an entire family in comfort.

If an employer only finds it viable to pay a low wage, and someone is happy to work for it, then why be forced into paying a higher one? (Which I understand you still consider far too low.) The chances are that job will just disappear instead.

Reply to
BartC

Anyone can own their home by paying their mortgage for the full 25-year term, or often considerably less as people just pay off the balance.

But it is a choice open to anyone (admittedly a little difficult at the moment with high property values and tighter lending).

Reply to
BartC

You assume I spent time choosing it carefully. The only point that I intended to make, was that you already have the benefit of "free" housing, and that is why you do not receive housing benefit. I was not intending to embark on a discussion of the rights and wrongs of this situation, or be disparaging about sacrifices you may have made - the state takes you as it finds you at that moment in time, and if you have no ongoing rent or mortgage to pay, then you get no HB.

And before you bemoan the cost of upkeeping the house, you could sell the property and rent elsewhere, at which point maintenance would become the responsibility of the landlord, and leaving you with a significant cash sum. But as you already know, that would put you above the capital limits, leaving you with little or no cash benefits. If anything, the tate departs from the general rule in cases such as yours, by disregarding the capital value of your main residence, rather than expecting you to sell it to keep yourself. After all, I say rhetorically, you clearly should not have purchased the house, if the cost of doing so left you unable to support yourself through later periods of unemployment or sickness.

Reply to
Ste

I wouldn't over-egg the pudding. Why exactly were you working 7 days a week anyway?

Had someone do that to me yesterday at about 5am.

Reply to
Ste

...

I'm interested in how the two were related. Did the low-paid job actually involve some sort of training or acquisition of skills, or did the stint of low-paid work just act as a signal to employers that he's content to work for less?

And getting out into the workplace will, often, simply mean that you stay on a wage that is not a living wage. That's my whole point, that if people are not willing to withdraw their labour at any rate of pay, then wages will drop to nothing when there are surplus workers.

Reply to
Ste

Perhaps the bosses will be willing to share their profits more freely then, or do they also have a "sense of entitlement"?

Reply to
Ste

Well you don't need to patronise me, of all people, on economics.

Reply to
Ste

It doesn't matter what you say they are. The fact is, most people want them.

Reply to
Ste

I accept that in principle, but you give no obvious explanation for why your "essentials" were so much more costly.

Perhaps, but the fact is that people must typically take what is on offer in the market. Individuals are not in a position to conjure their ideal jobs from thin air.

Why *not* force him? It seems perfectly acceptable to me to say that we have social policy objectives that are outside the interests of what the individual employer may prefer.

Perhaps, but obviously I consider the market to be inherently dysfunctional.

Reply to
Ste

Yes, we can all agree about bankers. The problem is that there is no such thing as "overcharging" in a market economy - goods and services which are priced at a level that exceeds their value would, by definition, have no takers. That there are still takers, only proves that these goods and services are not overpriced as far as the market is concerned.

Reply to
Ste

It's not a choice open to anyone at all.

Reply to
Ste

I was young, we didnt have much money (who does when you first take on a mortgage?), I was fit and able to do the work, it was on offer.

It's one of the reasons we were able to pay our mortgage off early. Every time we got a couple of grand behind us, we paid a chunk off of the mortgage.......after 16 years, the surrender value on our endowment policy equalled what we owed on the mortgage and seeing as the policy was dying on its feet, we bailed out.

Reply to
Rasta Pickles

It may also show that the market is not as free as it might be.

Reply to
Clive George

That may be a possible answer to the abstract question, but I don't see how it applies in the case of banking. Consumers are not forced to have accounts, and there are plenty of providers in the market. I'm interested to hear how you've arrived at the conclusion that the banks are overcharging.

Reply to
Ste

Well, that is what you'd brought it on to :-)

I don't think retail banks do overcharge the average in-credit personal customer, and even those people who do pay large amounts of penalties aren't fuelling the bonuses. The massive profits we're talking about don't come from there - they come from the large amounts of money people chuck at the market in investments, some of which are very strongly encouraged (pensions), and from taking a slice of eg commodities.

Reply to
Clive George

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