United Kingdom

How do you even deal with wage compression? It feels like it's ingrained socially at this point, people just seem willing to accept that pay because there's no alternative. I know that for public sector jobs it's a tricky balancing act where the government can't increase a salary for roles in 1 Civil Service grade as it may disincentivise workers in another role at the same grade. That probably hasn't helped when highly skilled roles that require decades of experience are tiered similarly to a role that may only take 6 months of training, where that high skill role wage is being constrained by that lower skill role. Perhaps that's had a wider effect of bringing the perceived value down? I haven't spent any time really thinking about this though, if you have any resources on this, I'd love to give them a read/watch.

Also sorry if my comments felt like I was implying young people are lazy, that wasn't what I was getting at at all. I think the apathy that young people feel is absolutely valid, and even workers who are in their late 50's who have been hit by redundancy are feeling this apathy intensely as they may not see any opportunities that allows them to provide for their families due to the general outlook of things.

I don't have that many answers, but I'll give it a go.

I think we need to come down extremely hard on landlords, potentially crippling their income stream. They chose an investment, and all investments carry risk, the risk in this case is that too many people can't afford housing, and the government has to step in and heavily regulate those who profiteer off of basic shelter. This would apply to anyone with rental properties, second homes, long term investment opportunities, ect.

Along side that, a shakeup to planning permission. Fuck NIMBYism, sorry but you don't get a say when people are paying 80% of their income on the bare essentials. From the top down, mandate construction of new housing in an aggressive manor. After Thatcher absolutely fucked us by forcing the local councils to sell off their council houses with the start of austerity, we've been at a ludicrous deficit. I think the figure I was reading is we need to be building about 400,000 houses a year and then in 5 years time, we'll get "close" to fixing the lack of supply that we're faced with now

Where does this money come from for that? I dunno, I would guess borrowing like we have done. It's risky as hell, but it's better than the current risk where we borrow against our rise in GDP, just hoping we outpace the loan rate without any long term plan to reduce the cost of living. Failing that, a wealth tax could maybe be possible? In the tune of 0.5% or so. That would generate an insane amount of revenue, but it would risk foreign investors looking unfavorably towards the UK. It would look risky for their assets, so foreign investment may fall in a dangerous way, maybe this isn't the best plan? I just have no idea, it's not my area of knowledge.

I think the above could be enough to trigger an actual wealth transfer. By dramatically reducing the cost of living, people will actually have disposable income. Income that can go into buying things. Say you work selling clothing, your customers suddenly having 50% more of their paycheques to spend is like the ideal situation, now they actually have the funds to buy your wares. With that higher income, well now you can hire more staff, you can pay your staff more also. You're not having to work to such a fine margin as economically your customers aren't as screwed just trying to survive.

I have no idea if this is all viable to be clear, I hope that I've come to some solid conclusions and ideas here, I'd love to hear pushback on all of that as well as I'm sure I've made some wack assumptions.