Desperate aid organizations say the queues for food in the country’s cities have become twice as long and so well. “More people come to us crying because they can’t raise money for the most important things”, a Salvation Army aid worker tells NRK. It is especially difficult for those who have more than themselves to feed. “More and more moms and dads go to bed hungry”says a Blue Cross aid worker.
News of the rapid growth of food queues is just the latest in a long line of social disaster on the way. Schools report that rising food prices mean more and more children show up to school hungry.
Nearly 12% of children in Norway are growing up in poverty, and that was before this year’s price crisis.
A single mother who is a kindergarten teacher tells Kvinner og Klær that she had to take on extra work to manage the bills. But it doesn’t stop there. In addition to getting up at night to wash clothes when it’s cheaper, she now has to use credit card to pay the electricity bills. It goes without saying that it won’t last long.
Due to rising electricity and food prices, a disabled person with the minimum tariff has become poorer by NOK 5,000 compared to last year. It is very bad for the unfortunate they have obtained the increase in social security – but their purchasing power has shrunk – and so they have been pushed over the income limit for housing allowance, so that they lose several thousand every month in housing and electricity support.
None of these people have the opportunity to escape to Switzerland to save money. And all this happens while it is still summer. What happens when the scale shows less, I hardly dare to think.
It actually got that bad let the debt collection industry sound the alarm:
“It’s a toxic cocktail, where interest rate hikes mix with skyrocketing electricity bills, high food prices and high gasoline prices. I don’t think politicians understand the gravity of how many families are going off the precipice “, says Geir Grindland in InkassoPartner As.
I think Grindland is right that many of my Storting colleagues don’t understand the gravity of the situation.
When you increase an annual benefit of NOK 1,064,318, which is almost five times the minimum pension of NOK 210,000, it may take some time before you realize what it means that food prices have risen significantly since last year. .
For those of us with relatively good finances, the current price crisis could mean we have to cut a couple of streaming services or, at worst, ask the bank for an interest-free installment period.
by Erna Solberg the savings tip for the Norwegian people this summer was to choose a slightly cheaper vacation, “slightly cheaper airplane seats, slightly simpler standard”.
But for the disabled single mother who showed up earlier this summer, it’s not about choosing a cheaper plane seat. She had to sell the bed let’s say to afford food for the kids.
For hundreds of thousands of Social Security people, retirees and low-wage workers, there is no extravagant expense they can drop or a buffer account to tap into. For them, the choice is “heat or eat,” a phenomenon that we may have thought belonged to Dagsrevyen’s foreign relations, but which has now become a reality for many to the fullest extent.
Unfortunately, we have to realize that the social democratic lie of life that poverty is primarily something that belongs in the history books or abroad simply is no longer valid. Here, too, poverty has once again become a great and serious problem.
It must be so? Norway is not a poor country. Conversely, the problem in the Norwegian economy is that too much money is being spent.
Both the government and the central bank now see it as their main task to reduce people’s purchasing power in order to reduce the pressure on the Norwegian economy. There can be many good reasons for this, but it is worth remembering that purchasing power is far from evenly distributed across the population.
It is not single mothers with disability benefits that are creating the bubble in the Norwegian real estate market. The lowest paid cannot be blamed for rising food prices. And in any case, it is not the minimum retirees who consume too much electricity.
If you want to reduce the purchasing power of the population, you should start with those who have more, not put the burden on those who have less.
Now it’s serious. Tens of thousands of Norwegians face a winter they are unable to cope without help.
The question is whether the government has understood the social challenges in Norway as much as InkassoPartner AS has. If the will is there, it is entirely possible to save the winter for many Norwegians. But then the government must take seriously Jonas Gahr Støre’s promise that “this budget will be the most redistributive in recent times”.
It doesn’t just mean raising taxes for the rich, but it requires a significant increase in everything from family allowances to minimum rates for social security and pensions so that those with less can at least keep up with the gallop in prices. Otherwise, this winter will be code red for ordinary people.
–
