The reality of today’s Minimum Wage: The baseline of our Economic Crisis

The biggest elephant in this economic room and probably the reason why Kier Starmer was falling over himself over the use of the term and definition of ‘working people’, is there is a growing underclass of the population who cannot earn enough money to pay for the basic essentials that they need to live each week or month.

The ‘Minimum Wage’ – even at the £12.21 it is expected to reach in April 2025, will not meet the basic cost of living.

The Minimum Wage is not enough for a single person, living alone, to be able to meet all of their basic or essential needs and expenses, without having financial help, receiving benefits of some kind, getting support from a charity like a Food Bank, or by going into debt.

In October 2023, I calculated that the real hourly rate that a single person would need to receive for a 40-hour working week would be £14.00 per hour – and that figure will certainly have grown in the year that has passed since.

The Politicians who do know and understand this – and please be under no illusion that those at Cabinet Level really should know what it really costs to live, also know that if they were to openly and publicly recognise that the National Minimum Wage isn’t anywhere near enough for a single adult who is living alone to live on, they would then be required to act.

Acting would require an immediate uplift of the Minimum Wage to a figure that is today likely to be around £15.00 per hour.

However, whilst the truth that this economic model can only make some rich by making many poor cannot be ignored, the imposition of a genuine Minimum Wage overnight would have immediate knock-on effects for everything and effectively bring the entire economy to a halt. For no better reason than the economic model that we currently have can only exist and function by exploiting people in this way.

When asked, most people who understand how business and money works will recognise that there is something very wrong with the way this economic model works. But will inevitably return to the response ‘It’s just the way it is’ and ‘Nothing can be done about it’.

This false position of inevitability or that it is impossible to change would be fine, were it not the fact that the people taking this position are typically not those being affected by it.

The control of money is where the true power lies – but only because of the way we think

When we have reached the point where money is the only thing that is important, it naturally follows that whoever controls money, the rules that govern money and the supply of money itself, will be the person or the people who are ultimately in charge of EVERYTHING – right down to what we do, think and say.

Because we revere money and wealth in the ways that we do today, the very democratic system that we believe to be in place to serve our best interests, doesn’t really exist.

Contrary to conspiracists talk and views, there is not some hidden world power that lies at the heart of everything and all public policy decision making, with someone sat in a bunker on a mountainside pulling every world leader’s strings.

Yes, a simple look at the way money rules everything, does make it seem logical that such a power exists. But the real power and influence that now lies in the hands of others who have or control money, and therefore have control over us all comes down to the way that we ALL think about money.

It is the way we think about money that surrenders our own power and control over life and everything else.