Can people please stop yapping on about the "Living Wage"?

FFS, whether we scrap the National Minimum Wage, leave it as it is or increase it to the Living Wage, it will make precious little difference to anything.

The main driver for low earners' net incomes (which is what really matters) is the amount of means-testing and taxation, and as a rule of thumb, if you're on the various benefits, then up to something like the median wage of £20,000 - £25,000 a year, you actually only keep about 20p for every £1 you earn. So whether you keep 20% of £6.19 (£1.24) or 20% of £7.45 (£1.49) is more or less irrelevant in terms of work incentives.

Do these people not realise this? And do they not realise that means-testing is more or less exactly the same as taxation? So whatever the revenue-maximising tax rate is (top of the Laffer curve) is also the cost-minimising benefit withdrawal rate? We'd probably end up paying out less to current welfare claimants if the means testing were made less savage, because more of them would be working.

And then there's the point that higher net wages just flow through into higher rents anyway, but that's best dealt with by replacing as many taxes as possible with LVT, or in the short term, just building more council housing. For sure, low-rent council housing is a kind of weird indirect subsidy to low-paying businesses in high-rent areas, but so be it, I'd rather subsidise businesses and their employees than banks and landowners.