Politics vs. Social issues

Social issues have been around for an extremely long time. Some of the more prominent forms of inequalities have been LGBTQIA+ Discrimination, Race Discrimination, Gender Discrimination and wealth inequality. Often the decisions and what sparks change in this is the political scene and who people actually vote for in their respective governments. The modern political landscape at this current time has been leaning towards more authoritarian and right-wing figures in the major superpowers in the world, and I would like to write about a few examples of why there is so much inequality in certain countries. I would like to first start off with the United States of America, then the People’s Republic of China and then our own home, Hong Kong; I shall go in depth into each of their inequality problems and try and pick out the most major examples of inequality and why that is spurred on by the country’s respective governments.

United States of America:

The United States of America has a three branch system of government (legislative, executive and judicial) which is legislative-led. The legislative branch of government (also known as ‘Congress’) has two chambers for politicians from all over America to debate and amend bills going through Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. The legislative branch deals with the passage of bills or legislation into the law of the land. The politicians in both chambers of Congress go through a very long and complicated process of amending and voting to get a bill to the point of becoming a law. The executive branch of government deals with executive decisions (decisions that must be made immediately). This branch of government is made up of the president, vice-president and their advisors. They approve or ‘veto’ (deny) bills coming from the legislative branch and also make executive orders to combat current crises. As of now, the executive branch of government is run by the Republican Party (conservative), the Senate has a Republican majority and the Democratic Party (progressive) has a majority in the House of Representatives. In terms of the bill process, there is a glaring issue with a system called the filibuster, which allows bills to not be debated in the first place as long as there is a minority who wishes so.

A lot of the controversy around American politicians is around Abortion: whether it should be allowed or not. I would personally consider it as a women’s rights issue, because it is a choice of them having a choice to continue pregnancy or terminate it, or if it is not their choice at all. The evidence has significantly backed up having abortion consistently, one of the more famous examples being the Donohue-Levitt Hypothesis, stating that the crime drop in America in the 90s was directly linked to the coming of age of children born after the Rode Vs. Wade Supreme court case, which legally allowed abortion in the United States in 1973.

Some of the current Republican Senators have voiced out there opinions which are anti-abortion, and has spurred on the more conservative Americans to voice their opinions against abortion. It is also the case that in America, the churches are extremely against abortion and has often voiced their extreme opinion against it, citing that it is an abuse of life for a mother to kill their own child, and that women shouldn’t be allowed to make the decision about their own child. The increasingly vocal conservative base in America has actively advocated for suppressing women’s rights and also suppressing the LGBTQIA+ community with legislation intended to block their sexuality/gender identity. Republicans are extremely concerned about legislation relating to LGBTQIA+ Affairs and abortion because their conservative values often align with pro-choice and anti-LGBTQIA+ beliefs due traditionalist beliefs in what the church teaches. This has been voiced in congress recently be an anti-abortion bill in congress which failed to advance to the senate vote due to the filibuster. This vocal conservative base in the United States along with the senate filibuster has caused many pieces of legislation in congress concerned with women, LGBTQIA+ and racial rights to be canned and never be passed and is a major contributor to the legal inequalities in the United States today.

People’s Republic of China:

The People’s Republic of China is an authoritarian country based on the ideals of communism, that is run by the Chinese Communist Party, who’s been leading China for 70 years. The structure of how legislation is passed is not that important here, as the party is always in support of the president of China, which is currently President Xi Jinping. The important factors to consider here are the three factors of authoritarianism, the terms for these coined by John Oliver of the show Last Week Tonight. Authoritarian regimes like in China like to project strength, demonise enemies (authoritarian regimes go after one racial group and proclaim they cause all the problems that the country faces) and dismantle institutions (this is important to make the demonization of enemies work). Another source gives a further few ideas about authoritarianism, in terms of how the population identifies with the government, and how the leader is usually extremely charismatic (or is made out to be charismatic). These traits combined together can make a country a living hell for any demonized people in that country, and often leads to civil rights abuse.

In the People’s Republic of China, there is a strong urge by the authoritarian regimes to demonise many enemies as mentioned before. Their most recent target has been the Uighur Muslim population in Western China, and the CCP have been absolutely brutal with their campaign against them, locking them up in institutions where there have been reports of brutal punishments and torture. The Chinese population know absolutely nothing about it or know very little of what goes on because of the very important tactic by the Chinese government: suppressing the media. They do this by banning key phrases about it and also only allowing the Chinese public to view only certain, propaganda based media so as to emphasise that this is the only news. This leads to the desired effect from the CCP censorship: the people of China only know what the CCP wants them to know, and that leads to them not questioning that information, because none of it conflicts with each other. Racial inequality is extremely ripe in authoritarian countries because of the push for nationalism from the governing party, the easy demonizing of them as a group and the suppression and editing of the media against those groups. The CCP makes policy decisions seem extremely simply, by demonizing a specific racial group and proclaiming ‘they have been causing this government to fail’ to the entire population, the people will go against the demonized group for the ‘good of the country’ because this is the information and news they are gaining from the Chinese Communist Party.

Hong Kong:

This is going to get a bit more technical because this will discuss wealth inequality. Hong Kong is one of the most prosperous places of businesses to run and also has one of the most extreme wage gaps in the world. The government is an executive-led three branch government system, where the executive (which consists of the CEO and their chosen cabinet) creates legislation for the legislative council to debate and approve on. The way the legislative council and the executive are chosen creates the situation of the Legislative Council always having a pro-government (which means that they are supportive of the CCP and their policies) majority. This is coupled with an executive appointed by a committee which also has a pro-government stance majority. This allows the executive to pass any bill they wish to be passed in the legislature and causes the pro-democracy (they prefer more democracy for the executive and the legislature) to never get any reforms they want.

The government in Hong Kong is incredibly friendly towards businesses primarily due to the many benefits and the support they get if they are pro-business. There is also the fact that the pro-government supporters are often businessmen who have to make dealings with the CCP. With this pro-business stance, the government has an extremely forgiving tax rate of 16.5% for all profits. The government also does not tax the residents of Hong Kong very much either, with the upper-bracket tax rate being 17% of their income. The idea behind these lower tax rates is that the government takes less money from people in order for them to spend more on the economy and stimulate it. The problem with these incredibly low tax rates is that they do not take both corporations and rich people into account, and is a proper waste of money that could be used on building, improving and expanding public services in Hong Kong. They also make the rich become even richer because of the proportionally low amount of tax they have to give compared to the working-class or even the middle-class. The Hong Kong government is doing this to create and maintain the economic theory of trickle-down economics. This is the idea that if you give tax breaks to the rich, the rich will spend it more on their employees, and the effect trickles down onto the working class. In actual circumstances, the tax breaks are concessionary to the rich, who then sit on the extra money they gained from it and in the end generate a profit or spend it on foreign, expensive goods, while the working-class and the middle-class grow farther and farther away from the rich in the wealth gap, and suffer the consequences of that. The working-class’ rights can be abused due to amount of money the upper-class has to threaten to file SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) suits, all because the working-class want to have a higher standard of living, while at the same time the upper-class wants to cut costs to gain more of a profit from their respective businesses. The working-class and to some extent the middle-class feel alienated from politics, due to the government not implementing policies in their interest and only benefiting the most rich and powerful.

Another major issue the Hong Kong government has that creates the extreme wealth gap is the way they handle their government budget. Every year the government has to spend all the tax money they gained from the people of Hong Kong on services that the government provides, like education, health and social services. They do this quite well, and do distribute the tax money, but they are extremely thrifty about it, and leave a huge surplus (this is money that is taken in from tax and not spent on public services) behind every single budget. In a lot of countries, a surplus stimulates economic growth because economists are more confident in a nation that is having a surplus than running a deficit, but Hong Kong’s surplus is over-excessive, with the federal reserve totaling around 1.835 trillion Hong Kong dollars. This is an extreme amount of money that the government is not spending on social services, education and hospitals and would be a huge benefit to the working or middle class. Instead all the government does with that reserve money is give free cash handouts of minimal amounts of money to anyone who can prove that they are a Hong Kong resident, which is not at all financially stable to those who need it. The Hong Kong government could close the wealth gap so much if they spent their surplus on public programmes in Hong Kong to make hospitals more wide-spread and state-of-the-art, education at a higher standard and less likely for students to get stressed and want to commit suicide, and for the social services to benefit the people below the poverty line with higher, more substantial payments to support them while they are unemployed.

Conclusion:

I hope through this article, one can understand way better about why certain social issues still exist in the world and the causes of the continuation of them. Some of these issues are unfairly politicised and shouldn’t be, as they should be set in stone in general society and shouldn’t change with every government, examples of this category include racism, discrimination against the LGBTQIA+ community and sexism. Some need to be politicised because it affects how an economy is run and managed, and has many consequences to account for. If one wants to truly solve social issues, one must look at the cause of the problem, advocate for change and finally tackle the cause of the problem head on to benefit society as a whole. As the Lorax from the Dr. Seuss' book once said: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not”.