In the United States, one of the richest countries, 40 million people live below the poverty line, and 5 million live in the same conditions as third-world citizens, noted in the UN report.
The policy of the administration of the US President Donald Trump not only does not help these people, but also increasingly widens the gap between rich and poor Americans.
“This strategy has been designed to aggravate inequality in American society and to drag millions of Americans into poverty,” the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston said after a visit to the US in December 2017.
The poor are put in custody, they bear the stamp of poverty, and the barriers to social assistance are becoming insurmountable. Such a policy will not help eradicate poverty, stresses Alston.
Trump Administration has introduced significant tax breaks for large corporations and wealthy Americans and has launched a process to abolish the law on accessible healthcare adopted under former President Barack Obama. According to the independent expert of the United Nations, these steps undermine the entire social security system in the United States.
“There is some contempt behind this strategy, even hatred of the poor, where the winner gets everything, “said Alston.” The US judicial system does not work to ensure justice, but to raise state income, the expert stressed.
With the advent of Trump, the atmosphere of intolerance towards poverty and the poor in American society has intensified. Some US officials in conversations with Alston openly expressed dissatisfaction with the payment of social benefits, considering these benefits fertile ground for fraudulent schemes.
According to a number of employees of the US administration, the poor and the unemployed often abuse this opportunity. However, representatives of the US authorities have not been able to provide convincing evidence to Alston that the scale of abuses is great, and the unprotected layers of the population have a lot of opportunities for employment.
Alston sees in the current state of affairs not only signs of infringement of human rights, but also a threat to democracy itself in the United States. The expert urged the country’s authorities to abandon the criminalization of poverty, revise the tax policy, and raise the awareness of Americans with medium and high levels of income about the dangers of extreme inequality for society.