41–50 of 385 posts
Good. Wages must be forced up. You can’t have a modern economy without a capitalized middle class. Real estate is so ludicrous we need quite a bit of inflation to make it reasonable again. The alternative would be a deflationary crash where real estate crashes and obliterates everyone’s home equity, but that is far more painful to virtually everyone.
What prevents landlords from simply soaking up the wage increases then?
"We advertised locally for 70 fruit-pickers and we had nine applications. On follow-up, only one was still available... in terms of recruiting locally, we failed completely," says Ali Capper, the owner of Stocks Farm in Suckley and chair of British Apples and Pears. At her orchard, harvest has just started. It must be done quickly and requires many pairs of hands. Ali had to turn to specialist recruitment firms and h…
Lorry drivers getting 40% higher pay: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-... In fact I can see this happening across many industries, and if you are one of those people working minimum wage can only be a good thing? The import of cheap labour does push down the wages of the working class - so the middle/upper classes get to buy cheaper fruit... I believe farmers will have to work with this ne…
> Indication of some degree of food insecurity was reported by 14.2% of the sample and tended to be higher amongst younger age groups, those on lower incomes, and home renters (as opposed to owners).
https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/advance-article/doi/10.1...
I somewhat doubt that we're talking about upper/middle classes here.
If you want to create jobs, start a pandemic. Over a hunderd thousand jobs were created for testing, contact tracing and vaccinations in my small European country.
Either wages need to rise or house prices need to fall.
[0] If you look at somewhere mundane like Essex the median 'affordability ratio', as measured by the Office of National Statistics ( https://tinyurl.com/x5jatcx8 ), was 4.5 in 2000 but is now north of 10. And yes, low interest rates help with monthly affordability but house prices have gone up ~4 fold in the last 20 years while the multiple of your income banks will lend has not, and peoples capacity to save a deposit that is 4x bigger has not.
[1] https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/buytolet/article-9969349...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the currency you are paid with changes anything (apart from tax evasion) ?
Being paid in fiat means my default income stream is a depreciating one. I'd prefer to be paid in an evolving currency, one emerging out of maximal open-competition. Why? Nothing breeds a better result.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the currency you are paid with changes anything (apart from tax evasion) ?
Being paid in fiat means my default income stream is a depreciating one. I'd prefer to be paid in an evolving currency, one emerging out of maximal open-competition. Why? Nothing breeds a better result.
There's a huge amount of people holidaying within the UK instead of going abroad. I wonder how many millions (billions?) are being captured in the internal market that would otherwise be spent elsewhere. Definitely part of the fuel driving the economic rebound, lots of people's holiday savings being released locally, and the middle class has generally been increasing their savings pots over the lockdowns.
"lots of people's holiday savings being released locally" True. But the UK have missed out of millions of foreign tourists. https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/tourismindus...
For example, you can compare local money (brits spending money in UK) vs foreign money (foreigners coming to UK for holidays) and get a part of the picture. On the other hand, local money are going to be spent in smaller towns, but the foreign money mostly go to large centres, London, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow etc. Then there are the amounts involved, 500gbp in London will buy say, a weekend for a couple, therefore employing not really that many people (cook, bartender, server, cleaner etc). The same amount will buy a weekend on the east coast for quite a few more people, therefore requiring more support personnel (hence, more jobs).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case the jobs were always done by foreign seasonal workers. I dunno if Brexit has made them more expensive but I'd imagine they are less easily available.
Both more expensive and less available. But the funny thing is in Eastern Europe, where these workers come from and where they presumably are now, there too are record job vacancies and rising wages. So probably something to do with either the pandemic or overheating economy from the cheap money.
"We advertised locally for 70 fruit-pickers and we had nine applications. On follow-up, only one was still available... in terms of recruiting locally, we failed completely," says Ali Capper, the owner of Stocks Farm in Suckley and chair of British Apples and Pears. At her orchard, harvest has just started. It must be done quickly and requires many pairs of hands. Ali had to turn to specialist recruitment firms and h…
I love how all the elite arguments that immigration doesn't reduce wages (which the working class always thought were complete bullshit) were proved to be complete bullshit during the pandemic-related border closures. Of course, the discussion about what to do about that remains - open borders & keep wages low, or close borders & raise local wages, or close borders & keep wages low & invest in automation - but it's n…
"We advertised locally for 70 fruit-pickers and we had nine applications. On follow-up, only one was still available... in terms of recruiting locally, we failed completely," says Ali Capper, the owner of Stocks Farm in Suckley and chair of British Apples and Pears. At her orchard, harvest has just started. It must be done quickly and requires many pairs of hands. Ali had to turn to specialist recruitment firms and h…
I love how all the elite arguments that immigration doesn't reduce wages (which the working class always thought were complete bullshit) were proved to be complete bullshit during the pandemic-related border closures. Of course, the discussion about what to do about that remains - open borders & keep wages low, or close borders & raise local wages, or close borders & keep wages low & invest in automation - but it's n…