A) Capitalism requires some poverty, requires some unemployment, to keep wages low.
B) Much of the country believes that, if you provide funds for people at the bottom, they'll get to like it there. They genuinely believe that making poverty "too comfortable" will stop people trying to do better.
C) Much of the country has been trained to resent anyone getting anything at all in welfare, has been trained to view a penny spent in welfare as a dollar stolen from them personally.
D) Much of the country still thinks in Dickensian terms, that the poor are poor because of some fault of their own, because they drink or take drugs or "don't have the habit of work" (our demonically evil DWP Sec).
E) The PtB is talking about alleviating "extreme" poverty on the fairly safe bet that, if you handle teh people actually starving in the streets, everyone will assume the problem has been dealt with. Anyone in poverty after that obviously doesn't work hard enough. The plebs, in both our countries, have been trained to only ever kick downward, to never question the oft-told myth that it's possible to make more from benefits than working and never consider that doesn't mean benefits are too high, it means wages are too low.
I grew up poor. Being disabled (I'm severely mentally ill and physically crippled), I'm still poor. And I have heard all the excuses, all the moralising, all the resentment. I';m for a national minimum guaranteed income but it'll take a real, blood-in-the-streets revolution before the PtB let that happen.
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