Thursday, March 16, 2023

Poverty

Poverty

It is expensive to be poor. Cash flow can look adequate if averaged over time, but when it bottoms out and the bank starts charging overdraft fees, and hours are spent trying to negotiate for services that should be human rights, you end up each day - each hour - in worse shape than before. 


As long as we demand that essential services necessary for human rights - shelter, food, heath care, education - be paid for with money, then for social justice, there must be a universal basic income. There must not be means testing. Rich people also deserve a basic income, and their hubris as to perceived needs  versus what their actual needs are, should be revealed and healed through catharsis (that is radical taxation). 


We are about to enter an era where the foundation of wealth, great and poor, is going to be removed through frequent unrecoverable climate emergencies. The bottom is going to drop out of the only economy that matters: the water cycle. As different populations find themselves in unlivable territories, there'll be a new kind of poverty, borne by climate refugees whose land equity has been cancelled. Among these will be many who thought they were living in a sustainable, or growing, security, that they alone were responsible for their wealth. 


The true landlords are the Earth, the seas, lakes, and rivers, the air, and the biosphere that maintains it and enriches it. That's the rent that has to be paid, in the currency of sustainability. 

No comments: