“The real value of this minimum social wage should be set immediately at a level which restores to the low paid their fair share of national income distribution, accounting for increases in both the cost of living and the benefits of technological change and rising labour productivity over the past half-century. It should not be seen as a mechanism to keep wages down, as is the case with the threat of unemployment at the moment. Instead, the goal should be to raise the relative wage of the low paid, and by doing so to engineer a much greater degree of income equality (Mitchell 2013).
Any inflationary consequences should be negated by an increase in tax rates on those at the top of the wealth distribution, to create space for the low paid to spend more out of their higher incomes, without pushing the economy beyond its productive capacity. A movement towards a more progressive tax system, such as the one which existed fifty years ago, alongside a radical increase in real minimum wages rates, supported by a job guarantee, would play a major part in a transition to a future of sustainable prosperity (Tcherneva 2015).”
