The people who only talk about skin colour and have brought it to the forefront of our collective thought, even for people who genuinely didn't think about skin colour.
This is exactly how the economy works. If you raise the supply of money, prices are going to rise. Does not matter whether you print it or you just extract it from someone's bank account and redistribute it. That's Econ101. You're equating SOME people getting to earn more, with your original statement that EVERYBODY should be earning more. Well that doesn't work.
Also, rich people don't do anything with their extra money? The exact opposite is true. Most of rich people's wealth is not in cash, it's in investments - while the average folk's extra money is "invested" in products that they can't afford, like the latest iPhone or a fancy house/car. No rich person that didn't just inherit their wealth lets their money sit in a bank except for a small percentage of their wealth, because they know it's a bad deal. How does trickle down economics transfer wealth from the poor to the rich? The poor should have wealth to begin with, in order for it to be transferred.
Why? Aside from the fact that if you give everybody more money you're just raising the supply of money in the market so people essentially have the same purchasing power as before, except now their integer in a database is bigger.
Do you believe permanently raising wages to offset black swan events such as the COVID-19 epidemic is a wise move? What about the next black swan event? Are they going to be paid enough then or they'll need a pay rise again?
Healthcare professionals are paid much more compared to the average UK citizen. Especially doctors, the average pay (100k pounds) is in the 2% of the earners. Emigrant doctors couldn't even dream of finding comparable wages in free market scenarios in their own countries and come to the UK.
I think the best we could do collectively is to pay out generous bonuses to frontline nurses for the duration of the pandemic.