Economic growth spurs wage increases
Category: HNN Broadcasted on 30.Dec.2017 - 20:36hrs Author Zayth Kadrim Comments: 0
Lorell Hall in conjunction with the Fountain Palace are pleased to announce wage increases being imminent for the officers and officials employed by the state. It has now been just over three years that the previous increase to the starting wage from 1,500,000 to 4,000,000 credits took place, and the government has considered it time to be reviewing the existing wage levels again, citing the findings of a recent survey on galactic trends on wage standards and the continued growth of the Cluster economy.
With the increase, due to be in use already for the next wage cycle, an entry level Lerin will be now earning 7,000,000 credits, up from the previous four million credits, with similar increases to be enjoyed all across the board, with the exception of the positions of Deputy Minister, Minister and Prime Minister. These positions will see larger increases to make up for the more modest raises afforded to them during the previous review, which had seen the Royal Council wages capped at ten million credits.
A Lorell Hall spokesman commented on the decision;
“To a large extent, the less the government needs to allocate of its monthly budget to recurring costs such as wages and reward-based benefits, the better, as the more we can instead invest into future innovations, infrastructure projects, and external acquisitions. How much we pay our top officials and officers has little discernible impact on the growth projections of the local economies within the Cluster after all, and too large increases at worst serve only to feed the galactic inflation and wage competition, which then have a negative impact on consumer’s purchasing power as well, just as it has on the state’s.
As a result of such thinking, for years now even such expenditures as mining costs and acquisitions of foreign technologies have remained consistently larger than the size of the government payroll, even as the galaxy at large recoiled from the bursting of a speculative derivatives bubble which crashed government taxation income everywhere, and brought about a galactic wide depression.
While Hapes Consortium was never in duress financially thanks to our considerable credit reserves - that have already returned to pre-depression era levels - and although we did not need to supress spending and could freely spend with the future in mind, regaining our economic might and recovering from the loss of practically the entire tax base has not been easy won; Through painstaking efforts over the past half of a decade by our industrial and infrastructure sectors overseen by the Ministry of Industry, we have been able to bring our income closer to what it was prior to the crash.
Because of said progress, we have now reached an income threshold level set previously by the Crown to trigger a new round of wage increases, which together with the to-be announced additional member benefits will see the government spending considerably more on its people. We expect the size of said expenses as a portion of the entire budget to even out somewhat in the future as the economic growth continues unabated, and our citizens need not worry that this would adversely affect our ability to continue to invest into our future in the short term either.
This is not the end of the surge. Developing an ever stronger economy is necessary to maintain and develop our military strength and asymmetric capabilities, without which peace and prosperity cannot endure in the Cluster. If anything, we can expect the Fountain Palace to be already eyeing measures intended to only further accelerate our growth. Let us not languish, not relent, be it in the face of adversity or in the comfort of our isolation!â€
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