A September 2009 Reader’s Digest international poll found that most people attribute their stress to concerns about money.
Forty-eight percent of participants from the United States reported money as the number one stressor, like the great majority of participants from around the world. In most countries, financial concerns ranked higher than concern for family or even concern for health.
Under capitalism, financial concerns overshadow workers’ daily lives because their basic needs are not met.
The economic crisis is debilitating working families, with 9.8 percent of the U.S. workforce, over 15 million people, now officially unemployed. Yet the corporate CEOs and their cronies in Washington and across Europe have another priority: lining their own pockets.
A Lancet international study on health impacts of the economic crisis showed that if governments spent only 1 percent of the funds used to bail out banks on public health and social services, additional deaths resulting from the economic crisis, such as suicides, would decrease.
