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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
London, United Kingdom - A decade of "austerity" - a political programme of slashing public spending on services in a bid to reduce government budget deficits - has seen significant effects on the health and wellbeing of Britons, new research has reported.
Life expectancy has stalled and mortality rates have increased, especially for the poorest in the United Kingdom, according to a report commissioned by the Institute of Health Equity.
The report, Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review Ten Years On, was launched on Tuesday and sees Sir Michael Marmot, a former president of the World Medical Association, updating his influential 2010 report, having been asked by the then-Labour government to study the question: "Is inequality making us sick?"
Marmot's latest research analysed a wealth of data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and Public Health England to explore what has happened since his last landmark report. And the answer can only be summarised as: Not only is inequality making us sick but it is killing us quicker.
In the past decade - for the first time in 120 years of increasing life expectancy in England - life expectancy has stalled for those people living in the UK's 10 percent most deprived areas, particularly in the northeast.
Among women from the most deprived areas - especially British women of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin - life expectancy fell between 2010-2012 and again between 2016-2018.
Mortality rates have meanwhile increased for people aged between 45 and 49 - the generation that grew up under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's administrations. The report details how life expectancy follows the social gradient - the more deprived the area, the shorter the life expectancy.
Marmot's data analysis finds that, as the social gradient has become steeper, so inequalities in life expectancy have also increased.
Austerity has adversely affected the social determinants that impact on health in the short, medium and long term. Austerity will cast a long shadow over the lives of the children born and growing up under its effects
:- Professor Sir Michael Marmot
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday February 27 2020, @03:05PM (1 child)
And there is a cost, a very real, very large cost. It's called inflation. This amounts to a tax on savings. All the extra value the government gets to spend has been effectively deducted from all the saved value everyone else in society has.
We can pull heartstrings by thinking of Granny's retirement account, we can mute them by thinking of some blue chip wall-street fund; but both are hit just the same, savings is diminished across the board exactly enough to pay for your spending.
So, anyway, you're effectively taxing savings, and what happens when you tax something? Simple, you get less of it. So the more savings is taxed, the less money will be saved. And the less money is saved, the more inflation is going to be required to keep covering your deficit spending, so you have a vicious circle here. You can juggle the balls easily enough at first, but the longer you do it, the faster the balls have to keep moving, until inevitably the juggler loses it and everything comes to a crashing halt. As happened, for example, in Germany during the 1930s.
It may be attractive in the short term (which is why we have it, our politicians can only think in the short term) but long term this is just a slow disaster.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2020, @09:49PM
Inflation may effectively be a tax on savings, but most government taxation revenue, for most governments, comes not from savings, but from spendings.
Income tax is collected when money moves from employer to employee.
Sales tax is collected when a person buys from a company.
Stamp duty when selling real estate.
Estate tax when capital is transferred to heirs.
All from the transfer of wealth, not from the accumulation.