I suppose that, because of the thread title, the discussion necessarily has to centre on those who are employed. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Those who are self-employed, however, are in another situation altogether. Some simply don't ever make anything like that much, because whatever turnover they may derive, their profit may sometimes make the "minimum wage" look attractive by comparison.
Even Britain's The Daily Telegraph newspaper - reckoned to be one of the more politically right-wing type - sported a front page headline yesterday to the effect that one Brit now goes bust every minute. One should, of course, be wary of statistics but, if this is to be believed (and I'm not saying that it is, as I do not personally have incontrovertible proof of its veracity), that means that over 10,000 British people are going bankrupt every week; on that basis, almost one in every hundred of the British population - men, women and children - are currently going bankrupt. Many of these are self-employed people; it's not so easy to opt for bankruptcy if you are employed (although it's far from impossible).
A company with which we had some dealings a while ago had an annual turnover of just over £38,000,000 and made an annual profit of just under £800,000. It went bust. Who's surprised? Moral? Turn over £100,000,000 annually and make a profit of £900,000 and you've had it; turn over £1,000 and make a profit of £999 and you've got it made - you won't live on it, though...
Another statistic recently reported in UK is that British people's total borrowings now exceed £1,000,000,000,000 (i.e. one trillion pounds); this looks slightly alarming when yet another statistic claims that Britain's total assets are valued at less that six times that figure.
But we're doing fine over here, actually; gasoline is only around $9 a gallon and the average taxpayer pays less than 61% of his/her annual income in taxes of all kinds. Someone I know has just left university, having spent nine years collecting four good degrees and academic debts of a mere £110,000; he's just borrowed another amount rather higher than that to put down a deposit on an apartment in London on which he has successfully arranged a mortgage of £600,000. So, he's well less than a million pounds in debt, so, if he ends up as one of those average Brits that pays some 60% of his income away in taxes, he'll manage OK, provided that he can land a position with a gross salary before tax of at least three quarters of a million pounds a year or turn over rather more than that much in his own business.
And people wonder why so many Poles, Hungarians, Czechs etc. have chosen to come over here to find work since their countries joined the EC. Hmmm... It's the Rumanians' and the Bulgarians' turn next year - then perhaps Turkey (which has a border with Iraq) and then, who knows? There's a possibility that another 50 or so more nations may wish to join eventually; will their peoples all want to come to Britain and get used to our economic life as we currently understand but fail to manage it, or will they just sit back where they now are and continue to blame the Brits for forcing prices up wherever they themselves go? There are many, after all, who hold the Brits largely responsible for buying properties in other countries and forcing up their prices so that they become unaffordable for the locals but, since it has become so impossible to afford to continue living in UK, can you blame them? People of various different persuasions may currently have North Korea, Iran, Israel, etc, in their sights as the principal bête noire nation, but in the end it would not surprise me if Britain - for quite different reasons - ended up as the world's most unpopular country for its apparent determination to infect everyone else with its economic woes; we're dam' good at it, after all...
Best,
Alistair
Topic: minimum wage