{"id":60100,"date":"2021-10-26T07:32:10","date_gmt":"2021-10-26T12:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60100"},"modified":"2021-10-26T07:32:10","modified_gmt":"2021-10-26T12:32:10","slug":"this-is-not-1997","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60100","title":{"rendered":"This is not 1997"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is not 1997<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Not that minimum wages are anything new.\u00a0 The USA introduced its Federal Minimum Wage as far back as 1938; although today each state sets its own rate.\u00a0 And the general consensus<\/a>\u00a0is that minimum wages help raise wages in general with little or no impact on employment as a whole.\u00a0 The broad theory being that by increasing wages at the bottom \u2013 where people\u2019s propensity to spend is higher \u2013 we increase demand across the economy.\u00a0 As the economy grows, demand for labour increases and forces wages up still further.\u00a0 And so, demand rises and promotes further growth.Although introduced to the UK by a Labour government, the National Minimum Wage is closer to the Tory approach to economic policy.\u00a0 This is because it passes the costs onto someone other than the state\u00a0immediately<\/em>.\u00a0 In this case, Britain\u2019s employers.\u00a0 Labour governments, in contrast, have generally sought the politically easier approach of passing costs onto future generations via public borrowing\u2026 which was often the better policy if a combination of inflation and growth served to lower the real cost of the debt even as the state\u2019s ability to repay it became easier.<\/p>\n

This was no doubt the outcome desired by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when they were elected in 1997.\u00a0 After two decades of suppressed wages \u2013 first under James Callaghan, and then under Thatcher \u2013 and despite the deregulation of the City of London and the increasing revenues from North Sea oil and gas, it was hoped that a legal minimum wage would generate the growth needed to lift people out of poverty.\u00a0 In neoliberal terms, it would \u201cmake work pay.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is not 1997 Not that minimum wages are anything new.\u00a0 The USA introduced its Federal Minimum Wage as far back as 1938; although today each state sets its own rate.\u00a0 And the general consensus\u00a0is that minimum wages help raise wages in general with little or no impact on employment as a whole.\u00a0 The broad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2857,379,426,4584,13351,30640,31360,820,2080,1808],"class_list":["post-60100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-demand","tag-government","tag-inflation","tag-minimum-wage","tag-price-inflation","tag-the-consciousness-of-sheep","tag-tim-watkins","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-wages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60100"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60101,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60100\/revisions\/60101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}