Mark Tabrett

One pound of ground beef now costs more on average than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

It’s really weird in the UK when you just work for a living, as in, you go to work and live off your own wages. Literally everyone I come into contact with seems to get some form of state support.

The UK is slowly becoming like Communist Cuba. Wage compression is a serious issue in the UK. For many decades, Cuba operated under a strictly egalitarian wage system where most government employees earned roughly the same amount regardless of their profession or performance. Full time minimum wage for a 40-hour week is now £26,400 a year. For comparison, a band 5 hospital nurse earns £32,073 and a newly qualified teacher earns £32,916. The effects of this wage compression is further exacerbated by punitive taxes imposed by the state, where anything earned after £50,270 is taxed at almost 50% when you take into account NI and Student Loan. You have a bizarre scenario where someone earning minimum wage in Carlisle or Aberdeen has similar levels of disposable income to someone earning a top 20% salary in London. We are starting to see the cracks of this broken system with NHS Doctors striking over pay. In real-terms their pay and standard of living has been decimated. I do wonder whether many are starting to question whether it's still worth becoming a professional in the UK, given how warped the incentive structures have become. I'll end this by leaving you with a rather telling image.

It is blowing my mind how many people don’t seem able to grasp that oil & gas in the North Sea is not “ours” but was sold off to private companies who will trade it on the international market like any other fuel. We don’t get any kind of privileged access to this fuel.