"Threatened by poverty"

[matrixmann]

Regarding the recently soaring consumer prices for foods that rise nearly every two weeks (like if they'd be measured by the price of oil, humorously spoken), it reminds you of openly raising the question why is it always called "threatened by poverty"?
Is "poverty" the shady scary guy with the club that stands on the sidewalk beside the house entrance? No! People aren't "threatened by poverty", they don't fear for his hit, they are already poor! This is the reality!
"Threatened by poverty" is nothing but another one of those public relations phrases that shall cover up the fact that there are people in the so-called "wealthier countries" of the earth who aren't as rich as their self-produced propaganda machinery wants to make believe. And, regarding the numbers that are repeatedly cited in this context, there even is no talking about "individual cases" and "personal failure". It's a mass phenomenon, always affecting a quota of between 15 and 20 percent of the population. No matter which of the "wealthier countries" you take to take a look at.

And, important to note, it's not even dependent on an individual's employment status. People work and have a job, but they're paid too few, compared to the costs of living in their countries, or they get job offers with too few working hours per month (half-time employment and so-called "mini-jobs").
Creating the group of "the working poor" - beside those people who cannot work anymore from old age or health reasons who are being kept on a short leash financially anyway, like undesired eaters sitting at the table that are perceived as "an unnecessary burden".

Comments

[kanzeon-2040.livejournal.com]

Official poverty rates are so arbitrary, but yeah, however you calculate it, big chunks of the population are living in poverty in lots of countries. The latest official poverty rate was 18% in the US, but also 18% in Cambodia, and 18% in Luxembourg, and 18% in Croatia — very different countries but all of them putting up with almost 1/5 of their population living in poverty however that is defined by them. If you can define and measure poverty, you can simply send a check to each person living in poverty for enough cash to remove them from the category, poof, but ... we don't do that. It boggles my mind that in many countries we have all sorts of programs to help families living in poverty, but we can't do the simple job of guaranteeing a minimum income for all? Why not?

[matrixmann]

I'll make the guess that it stands and falls with if you have an administration in politics as well as the economy that is focused on making people get an affordable and worthy life - worthy measured by the material and technoligcal possibilities that mankind has already reached -, or if you have an administration in all relevant areas of society that is just interested in letting a few people get some shares of the big cake, but in general passes the cake over to some other people which, by the local and global hierarchy, are in the position of being "the elite".

'Case, previous real socialist/communist systems have at least leaid a proof down for it that, for example, affordable living space - rent, costs for electricity, water, heating - is very well possible, even at low prices. The affordability was created by the state subsidizing it.
Basic foods that could be grown on the local ground were done so also - because agriculture can never compete in money revenues with industrial goods. (Agricultural products aren't just very well-paid... It's always been like this.)
What kind of goods and services are subventions spend on today - and with what reasoning?
Exporting goods is getting subsidized to flood foreign markets with one's won cheap products, purchasing a new car is getting subsidized if it runs on a different energy source than usual gasoline, rich people can deduct private costs back from the tax - but nothing that you can eat, which kids can go to school from, which adults can acquire higher school education from, which gives everyone the opportunity of cheap mobility, which makes having a home affordable for you even with a small income, which makes you able to regularly eat healthily; and so on.

So, public money mostly isn't spent to the well-being of people and to build infrastructure, but to shrink the costs of the wealthy for their endeavors that actually would be theirs.
Any miracle that the picture looks as it does? I don't think so.