Some of these figures are worse than I imagined.

• 5 million Americans lost access to healthcare
• 10000 more homeless families in the UK
• 200% increase in HIV in Greece
• 10000 additional suicides
• A million extra cases of depression
• 60% rise in suicides in Greece
• N.b. “In general, each suicide corresponds to around 10 suicide attempts and – it varies from country to country – between 100 and 1,000 new cases of depression”.

“Maintaining spending on broader social protection and welfare programmes helped, too: analysis of data from the 1930s Great Depression in the US showed that every extra $100 of relief in states that adopted the American New Deal led to about 20 fewer deaths per 1,000 births, four fewer suicides per 100,000 people and 18 fewer pneumonia deaths per 100,000 people.”

“He finds this all in stark and depressing contrast to the post-second world war period, when Britain’s debt was more than 200% of GDP (far higher than any European country’s today, bar Iceland) and the country’s leaders responded not by cutting spending but by founding the welfare state – “paving the way, incidentally, for decades of prosperity. And within 10 years, debt had halved.”“

(Source: tobreakandblossom)