The poor don’t have much, the rich have more than enough

The rich don’t have enough and the poor have too much.

This is based on a famous statement by the late American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson in his speech at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, in July 1988. He was describing the economic policies of United States president Ronald Reagan, where the rich were rewarded for their success and poor were punished for their failure.

I just happened to be in Atlanta a few weeks later and saw first-hand what he was referring to. I was part of a large Māori and Pasifika performing group from South Auckland that was doing a three week tour in the US.

We had always been told the US was rich and a world leader in almost every sphere. Instead what we often saw was poverty and homelessness, desperation and hopelessness.

The cities had thousands of people living on the streets with hundreds of people lining up for food at soup kitchens. We were not little people, but even we felt the lack of safety on the streets once the sun went down.

There were people begging for money in almost every public place we went. None of us came from wealthy families, but we were all conditioned to help people that asked for it.

I don’t know how much money we as a group gave away but it was hundreds and hundreds of dollars, a significant amount of money at the time.

Even though we did see evidence of wealth, the heartlessness of the US government abandoning the poor, the vulnerable, and those with mental health and addiction problems was a defining memory for me of Ronald Reagan’s US.

We have increasingly seen similar sights in our own cities, fuelled by the same form of politics that implies it is the rich who need looking after and the poor who have too much, particularly in the way of services and support.

Our social conditions are worsening with high homelessness rates and increasing unemployment. In December our unemployment rate was at 5.4% — the highest in 10 years. It could have been even higher if 62,000 people hadn’t left the country for good last year.

We continue to have a cost of living crisis that had many people doing it tough even before the current fuel crisis started.

Many social problems occur because politicians make trade-offs where even homelessness can be a political decision. We know this because during Covid homelessness all but disappeared, because that was the decision that we made as a society.

The university I work for trains about 40 social and community workers every year. Last year was the first time, in my 26 years of working there, that some students were finding it difficult to get jobs.

This was due to the cut in government funding that caused many employed by community organisations to lose their jobs. These are the organisations that support the families and individuals under high degrees of stress.

It appears the continual cost cutting of social services is not over. Indications are that numerous organisations, already having had to cut staff and services, are now having their contracts put up for to tender to see if these services can be done even cheaper.

The replacements are unlikely to be like for like services. Community and social services work with real people by forming real and trusting relationships.

These relationships are difficult to quantify in financial terms but are the fundamental foundations of working with people. Competitive contracting usually ignores the time and energy it takes to form those relationships but right wing bean counters treat the value of these relationships the same as looking for a new coffee supplier.

There must be politicians who genuinely believe that the poor have too much. A recent example is the scandal of some of our lowest paid workers working in the home-care sector only able to claim 82.5c a kilometre for using their own cars (which will return to 63.5c once the fuel crisis is over) while businesses can claim $1.17.

All the while the lower paid are in danger of being left to fend for themselves, the rich don’t seem to have enough. Why else would the wealthiest landlords need $3billion in tax cuts?

The value of the assets that the rich own are outstripping inflation and so they are getting increasingly wealthy, even if they do nothing. We are at the stage where even Inland Revenue and the Treasury are reported to be in favour of the introduction of a capital gains tax, as we are the only developed nation without one.

A capital gains tax doesn’t decrease someone’s wealth, it only slows down the increase, hopefully, for the benefit of the wider community.

• Anaru Eketone is a professor in social and community work at the University of Otago.