They live in luxury, you exist in squalor and die much younger
I have previously written several times about how being poor is seriously shortening your lifespan. Several previous surveys have revealed distinct difference between wealthy and poor areas across the planet. Riverside University in California (UCR) has published a survey in the journal of the American Medical Association revealing that poverty could be tracked to at least 183 000 deaths in 2019 in the United States alone. And only by counting people from 15 and older.
The gap between rich and poor in terms of living conditions and thereby how long people live, wide for a long time is widening dramatically. The last fifteen years since the latest capitalistic downturn in 2008 have seen a particularly dramatic development in this regard. The richest have become insanely rich, and the poor are starving or freezing to death. The poor, having no jobs, no prospects and little or no public support can’t afford housing, can’t afford healthcare and have to choose between paying their bills or buy food. Many can’t afford either.
We see demonstrated yet again what the establishment priorities are. They are quite self-evident.
UK has become a nightmare for large parts of the population the last decades. Government support for poor and disabled people have more or less vanished. The chance of gaining financial support has more or less dwindled to zero. One fact to mention among many here is that many disabled people, among them several people totally paralyzed from the neck down have been declared fit for work, and have had their support removed. There are many other examples. A 2019 United Nation report stated that the chosen politics of austerity had brought extreme poverty, suffering and death to millions of UK Citizen. It found that 14 million people, one fifth of the population live in poverty and 1.5 are destitute. Food banks, once rare has exploded in numbers. The 2019 report stated that austerity had led to «130 000 preventable deaths». In an updated report in 2022 that number had grown to «330 000 excess deaths» *.
And the signs are clear: If you want to see where humanity is headed, look to UK. The politics of austerity and similar are slowly being implemented in ever more western countries. Right wing and centrist parties become more and more dominant. Old left wing parties join them.
As with all other politics, humanity needs a drastic change in how we do things, and what type of society we favor. Where people aren’t starving, they go hungry. Where people have a place to live, they’re still kept in abject poverty. Norway, for instance had a million poor people before the latest gross growth in the cost of living in March 2022. Far more have experienced poverty since then.
This is a willed universal human problem, caused by capitalism and greed. It isn’t a design flaw, but by design. Those in charge don’t want to change anything. The system works well for them.
* «Previously improving mortality trends started to change for the worse after austerity policies introduced in 2010 when tens of billions of pounds began to be cut from public spending by the Tory-led coalition government».