Re: Blaming the poor
Originally Posted by
Percy Vere
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Even if the Government raised the minimum wage to, say, £12 or £15/hr, there would still be people who would be classed as "poor" simply because of the way poverty is defined. Taking a statistical look at salaries, the distribution is far from a normal curve. However, if you consider it as a normal distribution, the below average salaries can be considered "poor" so,
by increasing the minimum wage, you will increase the average and move SOME people out of poverty. Yet, by doing so, those that remain below the average will be all the poorer for it because prices will have to rise to compensate for the increased wages being paid.
In my opinion, the best way for anyone of working age to move out of poverty is to
improve their employability, and, thus, higher wages, by training and education.
Oh Percy! Where do I start.....
The minimum wage should be abolished, or reduced to A fiver an hour. This in turn would lower the national average and ensure that small companies could afford to employ more people. Labour is just too costly in this country and has priced us out of a global market and reduced many into poverty due to a lack of manual jobs.
Most people who are in poverty are not academic or can not be trained to be doctors, dentists, architects and engineers. They are destined to be manual labourers of which there are very few positions in today's hi tech world, and the more we employ machines, computers and AI to take the place of manual labourers, the more people will end up on the poverty line...
All these robots are achieving is to provide bragging rights for the few scientist, designers and engineers and to make documentaries for the BBC (look how progressive and innovative we are) and providing cheap goods, but does nothing to help the working man, except take away his livelihood.
Only the cream of our school leavers should be attending university, it makes some of them lazy and ill qualified for the real world, and by the time comes for them to enter the big wide world, mostly with qualifications that will never apply to proper employment, they are too old to be retrained or take an apprenticeship. In fact, too over qualified and soft to even go crop picking on farms, hence the need to employ foreign labour.
I used to deliver the post on some of the roughest council estates here in the North where nobody had a proper job, but every house had a sky dish and 52" telly, they all had state of the art smartphones and wore the latest designer gear.....These my friends are the people living in poverty.
Their attitude to the work ethic is zilch, and they are untrainable, but they know how to work the system better than any accountant, and they will never change while it is more beneficial to claim benefits and toss it off all day with a few cans of lager while watching the latest box sets.....