Money is politics by other means. It's real to the extent that a certain kind of politics is real.
If you don't have enough to pay your bills it's not because there isn't enough energy for you to heat your home. It's because making sure you can heat your home /pay rent/eat isn't a priority for the people with the political power to make those decisions.
Isn’t it? The vast majority of people in the developed world have enough money for food and housing, and the powers that be work fiercely - if ineptly - to protect that. I’m not writing off the influence of power and wealth, but this sentiment just doesn’t seem empirical to me.
Not in the UK it isn't. The government expect people to use food banks (run by charities, mostly churches) to make ends meet. They recently implemented a tax cut for the highest income decile in the country at a rate disproportionately larger than the tax relief for other income bands. The poorest barely got anything.
The complaint is that by reducing taxes for highest incomes there are fewer resources for the state to address the wellbeing of its citizens. It is not that the poorest pay less tax, it is whether social services and other government programs like education, environment, etc. are cut as a consequence of lower taxes on the rich (note the difference from raising taxes - where the wealthiest have greater capital mobility and access to professional services to shield incomes from taxation, so increasing taxes can fail to raise anticipated revenues when things go the other way.)
The only difference between an argument against a tax reduction and an argument in favour of a tax raise is what you consider to be the status quo.
The situation is more symmetric than you think.
Greater capital mobility cuts both ways: when you lower taxes you can also attract more rich people and their capital.
(I am not saying that this effect will necessarily occur, only that capital mobility comes into play both when raising and when lowering taxes.)
Oh, of course, the real solution to these problems is to tax land and not income nor capital: you can't hide land nor can it leave the country. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
At my age my father supported a wife and two kids on one salary and was able to purchase a home. With 2 salaries and no kids my wife and I cannot purchase a home.
If you don't have enough to pay your bills it's not because there isn't enough energy for you to heat your home. It's because making sure you can heat your home /pay rent/eat isn't a priority for the people with the political power to make those decisions.