Ultimately this is going to correct. My preference is that it corrects by governments enforcing a fairer distribution because otherwise it's going to end violently and we're rapidly approaching a point of no return where the wealthy hold so much power and there's nothing left to steal. Basic human necessities like food, water and shelter are being eroded.
You can look at a bunch of warnings like this. Food bank usage, claims for various forms of welfare (such that it is), homelessness (and housing insecurity more generally), levels of debt, etc.
Sadly, I personally believe we're beyond the point of no return where it comes to solving these problems with electoral politics. The world is going to sink deeper into fascism and for awhile "order" will be maintained with ever-increasing police states.
In the UK in particular, Labor has predictably completely failed to address affordability issues. Keir Starmer will likely be ousted in a leadership challenge and the likely winner of the next election is Reform.
All so a handful of people can have even more wealth they just don't need.
also self entitlement, reliance on the government is at the highest, individual autonomy is at the lowest ever
Almost every year in almost every country will have:
- record GDP
- record government spending
- record total wages
- record stock market prices
- record asset prices
- record government debt
You need to put these values in relation to something, otherwise they don’t mean anything.
For the UK, take for instance the public sector net wealth (Ie. Everything the UK public collectively owns). It collapsed drastically, from 220bn in 2006 to -900 bn in 2025.
Absolutely off the charts. As a result of this, the government can’t provide health care and basic support for its citizens anymore.
Question: who has all this wealth now, who is the UK indebted to?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe...
There's just no ability to get anything done. Whether it's big projects (HS2) or the basics (emptying bins, fixing potholes), nothing seems to work any more. And it feels like most of our tax is being converted directly into private profits while getting very little done.
"Budget 2025: how inflation and the two-child benefit cap has increased poverty"
And indeed this is an article against the 2-child benefit cap.
This is obviously full of warm feelings but ignores the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford. The article interviews a family with 4 young children and apparently no money, for example...
Regarding poverty in general, I think the main issue in the UK is that there has been no economic growth since the financial crisis and GDP per capita is decreasing, i.e. people are getting poorer, which bites those on low/no income first and most.
This is also all on the back of people complaining about declining birth rates!
It’s a very difficult area to navigate, politically. While it’s entirely understandable that there’s public discomfort with the idea that a family could bring in more in benefits than the average national wage (like, why the hell am I bothering with working in a system like that?! Am I the sucker here?), you also have to take into account that kids are going to need a certain amount of support, just to stand a chance in life.
So how do you ‘punish’ the parents, or even just balance the feeling of what’s ’right’, while not punishing innocent parties?
I agree though - the underlying cause is that the UK is stagnating, the average national wage is really not good anyway. And that’s the driver of a lot of the problems we see with anti-migrant sentiment, with benefits restrictions, with all sorts of stuff. If the country was thriving it wouldn’t be so much of an issue.
I had to rely on food banks when my parents kicked me out at 16. I had to again my second year of marriage while I was still in graduate school and our car got hit, forcing us to use our food budget (and we did have a budget that we followed) for the family.
For the second time, I had kids, I had a good job, so did my wife, I was seeking higher education to advance in my career. But times were tight due to factors out of our control, and we needed help.
What should we have done differently?
It's not 'can't afford kids', it's 'don't prioritise having kids'. And IMHO, they've been taught to think this way. To put career and materialism above family. There's also the constant messaging about an impending climate apocalypse or the rise of new fascism/nazism - which helps justify 'I don't want to bring new life into this world' logic.
Other cultures continue to have kids even in relative poverty, they don't choose to stop having families because times are tough.
If the two child benefit cap was in place then, we would have been in food poverty in one of the richest nations on earth.
Not every situation is as mind numbingly simple as you paint it. Most people don’t have additional children in an attempt to game the system. That’s a moronic point of view.
quite the juicy implication there, chief
> political willpower is not enough
That the economy is in terrible shape shouldn't get in the way of the rich getting richer. No one knows where all that money is coming from but people are also miraculously to poor to buy, build or rent a home. With all that nice scarcity in the market, whatever units are left make a lovely investment opportunity to put all that extra money into which again feeds into the scarcity. So much winning it's tiring!
If you still don't have enough, it's out of sheer incompetence and greed
Also, removing the option to have multiple jobs?
Well, not necessarily but a cap of the number of hour before you vastly exceed the poverty threshold is obviously a must have be it by law or sheer force of lore and habits. Otherwise this is in practice driving society to tolerate slavery, just tagged differently. If all that an individual is able doing all days through is serving mercantile work, this person represent a net negative to its society.
Yes, I am not of the view that a public official should have a private career too. It creates influence.
But as housing has been commoditized, it will be very tough fight to change it. Even people in governments can be land lords…
All other branches are commoditized as well and owned by big players who own markets.
It's funny that for some people, the answer of the enormous failings of Marxism is always "We need even more Marxism!"
Take MI5. Their remit explicitly includes safeguarding the democratic system. Yet when you’ve got a government holding cosy meetings with global asset managers and, like magic, Digital ID turns into a flagship national policy nobody voted for, where are they? Nowhere. They’re busy pumping out LinkedIn-based “espionage alerts” about Chinese headhunters while ignoring policy capture happening in broad daylight. They don’t even need the Prime Minister’s blessing to investigate that kind of threat. They just… don’t.
So yes, we have oligarchic corporatism. But the real failure is that the institutions meant to keep it in check have basically checked out.
ultimately its a very politically difficult situation since you're entering the quagmire of what constitutes being poor. that's a discourse where political careers go never to return - easier to just throw your hands up in the air and just give everyone as much free food as they want.
ofcourse this then leads to the discussion of "wait... why don't we just do that anyway? arne't we a first world country?" but then you wind up with a whole enterprise of getting food for free (or steep discount) only to sell it to another community that doesn't have access to it and taking a profit. i think a similar problem (?) exists in the US, with SNAP food rations being (re?)-sold to latin americans.
