The Republican Base is Dying Even Faster than We Thought

A study released yesterday finds that death rates for low-income white middle-aged Americans are rising significantly:

That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.

In other words, the Republican base is dying even faster than we thought.

My sister's ex-husband is one of these statistics. He was a hard-drinking, gun-loving conservative who ran industrial ovens, but struggled with learning how to program the newest equipment; he barely passed high school. He lost his job after the financial meltdown, started drinking heavily, and my sister finally divorced him when he got violent. He recently died at age 50 from organ failure after years of alcohol abuse. It was very sad, because he was starting to turn it around.

And this same thing is happening across the country:

Dr. Case, investigating indicators of poor health, discovered that middle-aged people, unlike the young and unlike the elderly, were reporting more pain in recent years than in the past. A third in this group reported they had chronic joint pain over the years 2011 to 2013, and one in seven said they had sciatica. Those with the least education reported the most pain and the worst general health.

In other words, these people hurt and they self-medicate with alcohol. The article doesn't say it, but a lot of this pain is due to obesity: when you're poor you eat junk food and gain weight. When you're overweight, your joints all hurt and you develop conditions like sciatica, which reduces mobility, exacerbates weight gain and causes more pain. You take narcotics and drink to numb that pain.

That cycle will kill you in a few short years.

Since the turn of the millennium, income inequality has crushed middle- to low-income whites. The financial collapse the Big Banks caused hit middle-aged Americans particularly hard: because of their age, they were the first to get fired and the last to get hired.

The total destruction of private-sector labor unions has made it impossible for these people to negotiate fair wages and exert any control over their fates. Gigantic companies like McDonalds, Walmart and Dollar General have destroyed most of the small businesses that used to dot the countryside, making everyone with a minimal education a minimum-wage drone.

Now these poor uneducated whites are mad because they're in the same boat that blacks and Hispanics have been in for centuries.

Are these the people backing Donald Trump and Ben Carson? People whose personal circumstances are miserable, who blame society for their inability to pull themselves up by their bootstraps?

Even though things seem bad to folks like this, the United States is still the richest country in the world. The problem isn't that the government is spending too much money on welfare: it's that giant companies shipped jobs overseas and keep all the profits for CEOs and shareholders while paying the people still employed in the states next to nothing.

For the last 15 years all the new money in the economy has gone into the pockets of a very few guys like the Walmart heirs, the oil baron Koch brothers, bank CEO Jamie Dimon, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, drug extortionist Martin Shkreli, and -- yes -- presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The business decisions of these billionaires are why uneducated white guys can't make a decent living anymore. It's not blacks on welfare, or 11 million Hispanic immigrants picking vegetables and cleaning hotel rooms.

The entirety of all the Republican candidates' economic plan is more tax breaks. That's all they have, because they're either billionaires like Trump or selling out to billionaires like Rubio. But tax breaks will all go to the billionaires. Because if you're not making any money, a tax break is useless.

The intrinsic problem of our economy is that people who run companies pay their employees too little and themselves too much. And the Republican presidential candidates intent on bringing about the new Gilded Age like it this way.

This is exactly the same problem this country had in the 1890s. It took a while, but it was fixed by organizing labor unions, raising taxes on the wealthy and reducing the ability of banks to speculate.

It's no accident that middle-aged, middle-class whites have suffered as labor unions have been destroyed, taxes on the wealthy have been slashed and banks have been deregulated.