Protests are spreading across Iran centering on power outages, and water shortages, but as they’ve grown in size and scale over the past 12 days, they also take on a political bent with protesters calling for regime change.

One state-run newspaper wrote on Sunday that, even if the protests began over the issues mentioned above, the roots of unrest go much deeper, touching on growing poverty and increased livelihood problems. Even according to the regime’s engineered statistics, the inflation rate for basic goods and services was 44% in July 2021, compared with July 2020.

The Resalat daily advised that, while the average annual inflation rate globally was 5% over the past 10 years, while it was 20% in Iran.

The paper wrote: “Increasing the cost of living is the most important factor of psychological pressure on people. The increasing cost of housing and rent is the second factor doubling the pressure on people. The first effect of inflation on people’s lives is a reduction in their purchasing power, which in many cases causes a lot of damage and can negatively affect the economy, business, production, and people’s lives.”

The economic issues in Iran are not caused by sanctions, but rather by the mullahs’ policies, which include spending the country’s resources on terrorism, warmongering, and lining their own pockets. To compensate for the budget shortfall, the regime has resorted to banknote printing, which only increased liquidity and inflation, thereby making the situation much worse for the Iranian people.

The Keyhan daily wrote: “Unbridled cost of goods and services needed by the people, auction of public revenue sources and closure of hundreds of factories and production centers, the declining value of the national currency, giving 30 billion dollars of currency and 60 tons of gold to the corrupted [regime officials] and increasing the price of housing eight times.”

The factions of the regime try to shift the blame to each other, but the reality is that this sort of institutionalized corruption cannot possibly survive unless all members of the regime are taking part. Indeed, the regime has far too much control over the economy and is unable to solve the economic problems, without hastening their own demise. Still, as the regime refuses to help the people, more people are shoved below the poverty line.

The Eghtesad-e Pouya daily wrote: “For workers and retirees, we can say they are either below the poverty line, or absolute poverty, or just alive. In our society, we see people only alive and not living.”

No wonder the people have been targeting the regime as a whole in their protests.