Having a strong "socialist block" could easily have the reverse effect whereby political discourse is scared away from socialist ideas as they are considered to be evil communism (c.f. McCarthyism). I would consider that a lot of mainstream media (owned by rich and powerful people) has attempted to keep alive the idea that socialism is the enemy and needs to be fought against.

Yet slightly left-leaning policies wouldn't look as "communist" when there's actually a communist state in existence.

This is so dumb. The entire history of “capitalism” is of the rich getting richer and the poor getting richer too.

They’ve been saying that the poor are getting poorer my entire life.

Yet in my country, we’re healthier; longer living; and yes the average person is wealthier than ever before.

It’s physically impossible for the poor to get poorer every year without a complete societal collapse. Yet people keep repeating this line.

It has nothing to do with reality. It’s socialist jargon.

Reading this topic, I'm so glad there are people who can see this, there is some hope in this nonsense I see around.

You're talking about absolute poverty and they're talking about relative poverty.

In many culture war debates there's a consistent theme of ignoring and/or discounting absolute figures and monomaniacally focusing on relative figures.

‘The poor getting poorer’ refers to absolute poverty.