A more radical idea than artificially hiking wages and hoping that sorts it out would be to bring down the artificially elevated cost of living. Which means cheap, reliable power, lowered taxes on employment, and total planning reform to allow homes to get built.

More broadly; > We think we're a rich country > We see prices rising, assume that means growth we're not participating in > We see taxes rise and public services/realm worsen > We see very rich (often American) and very poor people on TV and social media It's extremely for any populist to draw their own shapes with those dots. Pick a villain, blame them, get everyone angry about it, promise a political revolution and a reckoning for the bad guys. But productivity has been frozen for years. We're not producing more £££ per hour worked. We've expanded the population without building new capacity for them. We've allowed infrastructure to rot, and underfunded capital investment. We've thrown hundreds of small, but cumulatively huge regulations over everything. We have an ageing population. And fundamentally, we have the delusion that policy decisions which make the nation poorer should not be allowed to make *us* poorer. We want carve outs, protections, subsidy to protect us from the consequences of the policies we've collectively chosen; minimum wage hikes, triple locked pensions, rising welfare, subsidised energy bills or tickets to attractions. Costs have risen - the pound is not what it was 20 years ago, so imports are more expensive. We are exporting less and earning less money to pay for the things we want to buy. Other countries are getting wealthier, and we want to keep up with them, but without doing anything to achieve that. As Tom says, we pile expenses and restrictions on instead. So if costs rise, and our productivity doesn't, we're going to get poorer. If you protect pensioners, and you keep raising the minimum wage with no more wealth, you just squeeze the middle and higher earners. Our costs of living seem to keep rising, because we have placed pressure on housing, energy, and public services without corresponding increases in wealth to pay for it.

Wildly, this appears to be broadly true. There's a very small tail of extreme high earners, but there's a crisis of wage compression killing productivity and ambition. Not sure how you sell "lower/freeze min wage, abolish tax cliffs for higher earners" to an electorate, though.