As for the bankers, as I said good luck to them. Now tell me, how has the fact that they are going to get some fat bonuses going to detrimentally effect you or how is it going to detrimentally effect the country?
I meant to reply to this at the time and it dropped out of my mind, so I'll pick it up now if I may, because this is a really important thing to understand, I didn't understand it until relatively recently but once it'd been explained to me by smarter folks than me, and I got my head around it, I understood the significance of it.
Basically it comes down to this, money in and of itself is useless. You can't eat money, you can't live in money, you can't heat your house with money, you can't fill your car up with money - money is simply a token that allows us to purchase actual useful resources.
With money we can buy food, we can eat food.
With money we can rent or buy properties, we can live in properties.
With money we can pay our utility bills, we can heat our homes with electricity, gas, or oil.
With money we can buy petrol/diesel, and fill up our cars to get to work and do the other things we need to do.
You get the idea, money is simply a 'transitory asset' that gives us access to actual meaningful resources. Without that, it's just pieces of paper, there's a reason that a trope of zombie films is hundred dollar bills floating around that everyone ignores, because when money ceases to be able to secure resources, it ceases to have any meaning.
So here's why it matters when the bankers get massive bonuses whilst everyone else in the country gets bugger all.
When the amount of money swirling around increases, the amount of resources doesn't increase along with it. There's no direct correlation between the money supply and, for example, the number of houses that exist.
So we can work out the next bit, what happens when the vast majority of people are getting below inflation pay rises, whilst a few folks up at the top are seeing unfettered growth in their incomes? It's simple, the value of a pound in the pocket becomes less, you need more money to buy the same things you were buying before, from everyday essentials all the way up to hugely expensive purchases such as a house.
So when the Tories gave out a massive tax bonanza to the rich the other week, and uncapped bankers' bonuses, whilst giving a paltry tax cut to everyone else, what's the net effect? Most people get a few quid extra, whilst the already wealthy get loads more, the key point being that 'most people' need to understand that the £100 or whatever they just 'saved', is dwarfed by the tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds that the already wealthy were just gifted, so those people, relatively speaking, just became massively better off and made everyone else poorer - because they have far more of the 'tokens' (money) to compete for scarce resources.
This is why it matters when the rich get richer, because on a fundamental level, we're all still competing for the same resources, money is just a way to secure those resources, which is why home ownership for almost anyone in their twenties now seems like an impossible dream, unless of course their family already has money, in which case the inequality becomes even more entrenched.
