It’s More Expensive To Be Poor
Rich people have more money
(like obviously, that’s why they’re called -rich people-)
But then why is it more expensive to be poor?
Let’s talk about utilities. Unsurprisingly,
poor households pay 4 times more as a proportion of household income
on their energy bills than rich households.
But that’s not just because poor households have smaller incomes overall.
Gas and electricity actually costs them more.
You ever seen one of these bad boys If not, lucky you.
Prepaid energy meters - where you take your key or card
to the newsagent to top up with gas or leccy money
- are an absolute racket.
Despite the majority of families who use prepay meters
being ones on low incomes, the tariffs for gas and electricity actually
cost more. For over three-quarters of a million British
Gas customers, a prepaid meter costs £222 more a year than
a credit one.
And trust me it’s not wealthy households being stung.
It’s the most vulnerable.
80% of households with prepay meters installed are already in debt.
Over a third of prepayment households are home to
someone with a disability or long-term physical or
mental health condition, and almost half have children aged 16 and under.
The pre-pay scam forces poor families in fuel poverty to choose between warmth or food when
it gets cold. According to USwitch, 1.6million households will be forced to spend less on
food to pay more for their energy use this winter.
And because of predatory energy corporations breaking competition rules, fleecing low income
families for heating and lights actually runs a pretty tidy profit.
Overcharging the poor means an extra £250 million goes straight into the coffers of
Eon, NPower and British Gas.
Absolute pricks.
But an even bigger scam than how we power our homes is how we come to have them at all.
Every year, more than £50billion of wealth is transferred from the have-nots to the haves
in the form of rent.
To put that into perspective, the UK’s private rental market is worth more than the entire
GDP of the country of Luxembourg.
It wasn’t always this way. Home ownership for the young has collapsed. My generation
of millennials is at least 4 times more likely to be renting than our parents’ generation
of baby boomers. And the worst part? It’s not even cheaper to rent than it is to buy.
Buying a home in London as opposed to renting would save £396,049 over a lifetime.
But even if you’ve somehow managed to scrape together the 10% deposit to buy a house, more
than 40% of young people still wouldn’t be able to afford even the cheapest homes
in their area. Renting is no longer a temporary thing you do before being able to secure permanent
housing. The number of families with children who rent from private landlords has exploded
from 461,112 in 1996-97, to 1.7m in 2016-17.
Renters are more vulnerable than homeowners when it comes to personal debt. And it’s
getting worse. Between 2011 and 2015, the number of renters contacting the debt charity
StepChange increased by 139%.
Oh, and before you suggest that people should just move to places where there’s more affordable
housing, here’s a handy diagram for you.
This represents the places where you can afford a home.
This represents the places where you can get a job.
And this is the relationship between the two. [LOOOOOOOOOOL].
So the argument usually goes that we shouldn’t be too angry about poor folks lining the pockets
of super-rich shareholders because:
The highest 1% of income tax-payers account for 27% of all income tax, those are the figures
from August 2019. You want to drive those people from our shores?
As ever, all is not as it seems. If you’re amongst the richest fifth of earners, you
actually pay a lower percentage of gross income as tax than the poorest fifth.
And if you’re wealthy enough to make it into the upper tax brackets, the likelihood
is you’re rich enough to find and exploit legal loopholes to wriggle out of paying HMRC.
More than 9,000 of the UK’s richest people form companies and partnerships to get out
of paying a higher rate of tax on their salaries.
Where you gonna find the money? Like they don’t know!
By paying capital gains tax rather than income tax, these lot pay an average tax rate of
14.8%. Compare that to the basic rate of 20% that earners on 12 to 50k are made to cough
up.
Where’s this magic money tree? Haha, it’s in the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, The British
Virgin Islands, Panama, PANA-FUCKING-MA.
And through a combination of legal loopholes, offshore bank accounts, and tax cuts from
their mates in 4 successive Tory governments, the income tax intake from the super-rich
fell by nearly a billion between 2010 and 2017.
Fair enough
It’s not simply the case that people being rich is bad because poor people exist. It’s
that a few people getting richer is making people a whole lot poorer.
Well I’m very lucky!
You can see this most starkly in the phenomenon of the working poor. In the mid-1990s, most
households in poverty weren’t in work. Now, the opposite is true - 58% of all people living
in poverty are part of a working household.
Mike Ashley, the ‘much-loathed by geordies’ billionaire boss of Sports Direct,
“I dislike the man with a great passion”
oversaw working practices which meant that warehouse staff were effectively being paid
below the minimum wage.
Despicable
Security guards prevented workers from leaving when their hours were up, and presided over
such an intense culture of fear that one woman was forced to give birth in a toilet - and
then she had to go straight back onto shift.
The richest man in the world, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, just built a mansion which has
25 bathrooms. Which is the kind of thing that rich people do, why wouldn’t you want to
piss in 25 different places. But Amazon workers in the UK are forced to work to such demanding
productivity requirements that they face being disciplined for taking toilet breaks, and
some end up urinating in bottles.
Amazon’s minimum pay for workers in the UK is £10.50 for Londoners and £9.50 for
everyone else. And if you want to compare that to Jeff Bezo’s hourly wage, he’s
making 365,672.7 times as much as some of his UK staff.
Jeff Bezos is stupendously rich because his workers are broke, exploited and miserable.
Being poor isn’t some cruel accident of fate, like an anvil dropping on your head
or James Cleverly being named James Cleverly.
People are poor because others are rich,
it’s profit which keeps people trapped in poverty.