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-- Title: Working Class White America is ‘Dying of Despair’ Donald Trump is right. The health care issue is not going away. The ongoing slow-collapse of Obamacare guarantees that. Let’s add fuel to the fire: the latest bad news from health experts. White Americans are privileged, academics tell us. Yet millions of whites are experiencing a rise in mortality rates formerly associated with failing countries. They’re enduring health collapse, a massive social failure, like what happened to Russians in the 1990s. For most of my life, I’ve been hearing the same trope from progressives. “If only this” — insert social problem here — “were happening to ‘straight white males,’ America would declare it a national crisis.” Plug in mass incarceration, AIDS, poverty, drug use, unwanted pregnancy, and you’ve got your progressive op-ed. Now white people are the victims. But not many seem to care. The latest data from a study by Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton came at a March 23-24 Brookings Institution conference. Its findings are stunning: Since 1998, death rates for middle-aged white people without college degrees are skyrocketing. Less-schooled whites face an epidemic of “deaths of despair.” This means accidents, suicides, drug and alcohol overdoses, plus related chronic illnesses like diabetes and high blood pressure that increase the risk of heart disease. Thankfully, mortality rates for less educated blacks and Hispanics are flat or declining. Middle-aged white people without college degrees are now more likely to die than African-Americans. What’s going on? To find out, let’s rule out two possible explanations. As Case and Deaton summarize: [W]hite non-Hispanic mortality rates for those aged 45-54 increased from 1998 through 2013. … [Mainly to blame were] marked increases in drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-related liver mortality in this period. … Mortality increases for whites in midlife were paralleled by morbidity increases, including deteriorations in self-reported physical and mental health, and rising reports of chronic pain. This epidemic hit us recently and suddenly. Just in 1999 mortality rates of non-Hispanic, non-college whites were about 30 percent lower than mortality rates of blacks. By 2015, they were 30 percent higher. A big improvement in black health was accompanied by a surge in white deaths. In 2000, the increase in less educated white death rates was concentrated in the southwest. Today it has spread countrywide. Whites without a college degree are not only dying more often. They feel worse, much of the time. Compare how 50-year-old white college grads describe their health compared to non-grads: In 2015, 73 percent of grads reported their health as “excellent” or “very good.” Only 43 percent of non-grads said that. What does it mean that “deaths of despair” are epidemic among blue collar white folks? Are they facing a crisis of meaning? Their income troubles are well known: working class white men have not had a pay raise for two generations. These stagnant wages lead many to retreat from the work force. Marriage rates have plummeted. Out of wedlock childbearing has increased. By the 1990s a divorce gap was already emerging: More divorces among less educated Americans, and fewer among the college educated. The unwed motherhood gap is also growing: Women with college degrees are between 400 percent and 600 percent less likely to have children out of wedlock than women without diplomas. So marriage and family have become less reliable sources of meaning in the lives of less educated whites. Church is becoming less important too. Read the study, “No Money, No Honey, No Church.” Back in the 1980s less educated white Americans were as likely to attend religious services at least once a month as the college educated. Just 20 years later, a “church gap” emerged, as less-schooled whites drifted away. Set aside concern for souls for a moment. Being involved with your church imparts “social and civic skills … and higher levels of physical and psychological health … both by providing social support and by furnishing people with a sense of meaning,” the authors report. Take these away, and don’t be shocked at a huge spike in death of despair. A third source of connection and meaning — patriotism — is also being taken away. The American story has been redefined over the last generation. Now what’s taught in schools is the story of our success at overcoming the prejudices of our white Founders. White Americans successful at work, school and love can deal with accusations of white privilege. They’re doing just fine. But since the 1960s the white working class has been the whipping boy of cultural elites. The left’s arguments skip the humanism of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. They draw on a new theory that only white people can be racists because power is derived from race. Take away fruitful work, marriage, family, church and love of country, and people don’t flourish. Many crawl inside a bottle of bourbon or opioid pain pills. Some die of despair. Who’d have thought it? Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Tooconservative (#0)
And, of course, the white birth rate crashes, guaranteeing a future for the US as part of Latin America. All of these things can be fixed, but not without a major redistribution of power and wealth. And that is unlikely.
The Beltway GOP has such a raging boner for the magic of tax cuts, mostly for the rich, that it is almost suicidal. They seem serious about nothing else. Not even regulatory reform or defense or tort reform or education reform. None of it matters other than the pure crack rocks of tax cuts they are addicted to. While I hate the Dems and their policies, I do grasp why the GOP has so little appeal to such large segments of the public. They never take a hit to do anything for the middle class or the working class. They always have another motive and any good they do for the working class or middle class is incidental to their real policy priorities.
And THIS TIME it's not going to work. Trump campaigned on three expensive things: immigration control (raises the price of labor in America), protectionism (raises the price of goods in America, and reduces the profits for the international traders), and peace with Russia (reduces the profits for defense contractors). His health care priorities include universal coverage and no preconditions on insurance. That will be expensive. Sure, Republicans want all sorts of tax cuts, but they're not going to get them. In the past, they have promised all sorts of things, but just gone for the tax cuts. This time, that won't work, because the country that elected Trump is attentive now, and is not going to accept that. The rich don't need more. They need less so that the country can thrive again. Making America Great Again means redistributing some wealth from the top to the middle and bottom middle, through government.
In the past, they have promised all sorts of things, but just gone for the tax cuts. You're kidding yourself. Having failed to sell their sham "repeal" of 0bamaCare, now they will pair the tax cuts with infrastructure spending, in the hopes of somehow getting enough Dems on board to pass them. Of course, the infrastructure spending is just expansion of the federal debt. They are not going to pay for it. For that, they will try to get their tax cuts for the uber-rich from a smaller group of Dems so they can bypass fiscal conservatives. This is a very familiar play by the GOPe.
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