Desperate aid organizations say that the food queues in the country’s cities have become twice as long and rightly so. “Several people come to us crying because they are unable to raise money for the most important things”, says an aid worker in the Salvation Army to news. It is particularly hard on those who have more than themselves to feed. “More and more mums and dads are going to bed hungry,” says an aid worker at Blue Cross. The news of rapidly growing food queues is just the latest in a long line that tells of a social disaster brewing. Schools report that increased food prices mean that more and more children turn up at school hungry. Almost twelve percent of children in Norway grow 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 has had to take on extra work to meet the bills. But it does not stop there. In addition to getting up at night to wash clothes when it is cheapest, she now has to use a credit card to pay the electricity bills. It goes without saying that it won’t last long. Due to the increased prices for electricity and food, a disabled person on the minimum rate has become NOK 5,000 poorer since last year. It is extra bad for the unlucky ones who have had their social security increased – but their purchasing power reduced – and have therefore been jacked over the income limit for housing benefit, so that they lose several thousands every month in housing and electricity support. None of these people have the ability to run away to Switzerland to save money. And all this happens while it’s still summer. What happens when the scale shows minus, I hardly dare to think about. It has actually become so bad that the debt collection industry is sounding the alarm: “It is a toxic cocktail, where interest rate increases are mixed with sky-high electricity bills, high food prices and high petrol prices. I don’t think the politicians understand the seriousness of how many families are heading off the cliff,” says Geir Grindland in InkassoPartner As. I think Grindland is right that many of my colleagues in the Storting do not understand the seriousness of the situation. When you raise an annual allowance of NOK 1,064,318 – that 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 increased significantly since last year. For those of us who have relatively good finances, the current price crisis may mean that we have to cut out a couple of streaming services or, in the worst case, ask the bank for a period of interest-free installments. Erna Solberg’s saving advice to the Norwegian people this summer was to choose a slightly more affordable holiday, “slightly cheaper plane seats, slightly simpler standard”. But for the disabled single mother who came forward earlier this summer, it’s not about choosing a cheaper plane seat. She had to sell her bed to afford food for the children. For hundreds of thousands of people on social security, pensioners and low-wage earners, there is no extravagant spending they can drop or a buffer account to tap into. For them, the choice is “heating or eating”, a phenomenon we may have thought belonged in Dagsrevyen’s foreign reports, but which has now become reality for many to the highest degree. 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, just doesn’t hold true anymore. Poverty has once again become a big and serious problem here too. Does it have to be this way? Norway is not a poor country. On the contrary, the problem in the Norwegian economy is that too much money is 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 may be many good reasons for this, but it is worth remembering that purchasing power is anything but evenly distributed in the population. It is not single mothers on disability benefits that have created the bubble in the Norwegian housing market. The low-paid cannot be blamed for the rise in food prices. And in any case, it is not the minimum pensioners who use too much electricity. If you want to reduce the purchasing power of the population, you should start with those who have the most, not pass the burden onto those who have the least. Now it’s serious. Tens of thousands of Norwegians face a winter they are unable to cope with without help. The question is whether the government has understood as much of the social challenges in Norway as InkassoPartner AS. 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 does not just mean raising taxes for the rich – it requires a significant increase in everything from child benefit to the minimum rates for social security and pensions, so that those who have the least can at least keep up with the gallop in prices. Otherwise, it will be code red for ordinary people this winter.
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Code red for ordinary people – Speech
