Yes, pulling all the money out of the schools and ignoring educational standards, growing poverty, lack of health care resources, lack of prenatal and postnatal care, high pollution levels, little in the way of social services, lots and lots of discrimination against women and minorities, and high rates of imprisonment for relatively small crimes do, in fact, have consequences beyond the creation of republican strongholds and prosperity preachers. Growing drug abuse and suicide rates are also consequences.

Oh, and they're knocking our average life expectancy down.

[gizmodo.com]

According to data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the life expectancy at birth for someone born in 2017 was 78.6 years—the third straight annual decrease. But the authors of this new study, published Tuesday in JAMA, decided to take a longer look at life expectancy and morality trends, dating back to 1959.

Americans, they unsurprisingly found, have been living longer and longer over the years. In 1959, for example, someone’s life expectancy was 69.9 years. But since the 1990s, annual improvements in life expectancy has been slower compared to people living in similarly developed countries. And by 2010, life expectancy had started to stagnate in the U.S. until declining post-2014.

This lag, stagnation, and eventual decline in life expectancy, the authors found, can clearly be linked to people between the ages of 25 to 64 dying more often than their counterparts in other countries. And during the years 2010 to 2017, their overall mortality rate actually increased by six percent—an increase that amounted to around 33,000 extra deaths. Certain areas of the country have been hit much harder than others. The authors found that about a third of these excess deaths were concentrated in just four states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana.

“It’s supposed to be going down, as it is in other countries,” lead author Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, told the Washington Post. “The fact that that number is climbing, there’s something terribly wrong.” ...

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Republicans: Let's make this a @#$%& hole country.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/27/2019 12:23AM by Dennis S.

One aspect of third world countries is the lack of any middle class. That leaves the lower class struggling to survive and beholden to the hugely wealthy upper class, which rules with impunity.

Starting to sound familiar?

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“No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.”
-- François de La Rochefoucauld

Growing older is mandatory. Growing up is optional.

"Idiocracy" was a documentary.

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=TC

What concerns me most is the despair these social factors create and the political disfunction that results. Such people are easily manipulated by unscrupulous politicians and biased media that encourages a culture of grievance and anger.

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Where is there dignity unless there is also honesty? - Cicero

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. —Wendy Mass

Hmmm...I spent 26 years in Indiana and then retired to Pennsylvania. I guess I’d better be careful.