Three-plus decades dominated by the GOP philosophy of trickle-down economics, tax cuts for the rich, and corporate welfare has resulted in a growing disparity between the rich and poor in this country–and a growing disparity in the life expectancy between the two classes.
In other words, the rich get richer, and the poor get to die earlier.
The poorer a country is, the lower the life expectancy is of its citizens. Also, the poorer a segment of the population of a country is, the shorter the life expectancy of that segment is versus the rest of the population.
In just the past decade, since Bush tax cuts and keeping gaping tax loopholes for rich corporations have ruled the land, the poverty level has increased, the median real income has fallen, and the number of people without health insurance has increased, according to a DailyKos article, which was based on Census Bureau data.
Not surprisingly, then, life expectancy in large portions of the U.S. has started falling behind the world’s healthiest nations, and life expectancy is declining in some of the poorest locations of the nation.
Think about that. In the United States of America, which is said to be the greatest nation in the world so often that the statement is rarely questioned (at least within its boundaries), some segments of the population are expected to live shorter lives than their parents–and we knowingly continue to support policies that will make this crisis worse.
Do the Republicans react by suggesting policies to improve the situation? No, they debate what we should do with the poor, unemployed, and uninsured. The policies are fine; we need more of the same–more tax cuts, more loopholes, and more corporate welfare. And let’s cut Social Security and Medicare while we’re at it.
When a person who is poor, unemployed, and uninsured becomes sick, some Republican supporters actually think that we should “Let him die,” which one enthusiastically and boldly yelled out at the most recent Republican debate.
Politics has become a sports-like game in this country, similar to when the Cowboys play the Giants, and we choose sides and root for our side at all costs. But games don’t affect people’s lives, and games don’t determine what kind of nation we’re going to be.
Politics is no game.
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Robert Schiele
Sep. 18th, 2011 at 6:40 pm
The good news is that I’m sure that’s only until the reactionary plutocrats figure out how to legally deprive the poor from having any lifespans at all–except of course for their indentured serfs.
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Reynardine
Sep. 18th, 2011 at 6:56 pm
They’ll call it an administrative freeze on biological processes.
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Reynardine
Sep. 18th, 2011 at 6:54 pm
The difference is that this has become the classic Meso-American ball game: the losers are SUPPOSED to die.
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Kate
Sep. 18th, 2011 at 7:48 pm
Sometimes the winners die, too. Sacrificed as an honor offering to the gods, since their victory was seen as pleasing.
Ironically, the same will eventually happen here. The “winners” will die, enslaved and tortured by their own greed. They will be their own undoing.
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planckbrandt
Sep. 19th, 2011 at 9:01 pm
Yes, the scholars say the winners die too because stress is a killer. And living in a country of have-nots when you are one of the few haves is evidently very stressful and dangerous! But, anyway. This has to be learned first hand evidently! It isn’t enough to have had grandparents who lived through the Depression or Holocaust because of these conditions to know these truths to be self-evident. We will all have to learn the lessons together. How boring! Such a waste of a life. And, it will be dangerous and fatal for some.
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Bobfr
Sep. 18th, 2011 at 9:26 pm
Our4thEstate Bobfr
@cnn @msnbc @nytimes #GOPFAIL at its best – The Rich Get Richer, the poor get shorter life spans bit.ly/oF4ndv – #GETaClueNEWSTAINERS
Yes.WE.Can. … DO.More.Together!
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Bobfr
Sep. 18th, 2011 at 9:29 pm
Our4thEstate Bobfr
@maddow @KeithOlbermann #GOPFAIL at its best – The Rich Get Richer, the poor get shorter life spans bit.ly/oF4ndv – #GETaClueNEWSTAINERS
Yes.WE.Can. … DO.More.Together!
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A Walkaway
Sep. 18th, 2011 at 10:45 pm
There are known statistical relationships between stress and shortened lifespan. Being poor is not only stressful, but it is so to the point of being described as a hellish existence for the homeless and very poor. You combine that with the unavailability of affordable medical care and treatment of even simple things, and it is obvious why the poor don’t live as long (a long-known fact).
The answers are simple… tax the rich and use the money to create jobs… single-payer health care (if not pure socialized medicine). Undo forty plus years of Republican and neoliberal stupidity (Free Trade isn’t free, especially for the poor working people around the world).
Next step in their playbook IMO… find ways to saddle others with the debt of the poor person who died. Make his or her family bear the debt – even the children. Have debt passed down from generation to generation.
You know, it’s funny. The damned Republicans and Tea Party have been ranting against abortion for years. Yet the only explanation for their reluctance to help people is that they want people to die. So they want to protect a fetus, but allow it to die after it’s born. We need to watch… maybe they’ll find a way to punish someone in the family of a poor woman who dies from poverty, even though her death killed the unborn. They can’t punish her any more so they’ll punish a relative (maybe the father?).
If doctors somehow save the fetus, maybe they’ll saddle it with it’s mother’s debts? Not only would they punish her for having sex (the real reason for the anti-abortion stuff), but they would punish the fetus if it survives by saddling it with its mother’s debts.
The conservatives will show themselves to be that heartless if we don’t stop them.
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Brown cow
Sep. 19th, 2011 at 10:34 am
The sad (and stupid) thing to me is some of those screaming Let Them Die will be in the same situation if they get a major illness. A lot of the Tea Partiers are speeding along their own deaths.
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planckbrandt
Sep. 19th, 2011 at 8:58 pm
Is it really the poorer country? Or, the country with the greatest wealth concentration and wealth disparity? Scholars say it is actually the countries with wealth disparity, i.e. plenty of wealth just in few hands, that are the most dangerous and backward. Poor countries where everybody is more or less the same are less dangerous and life is better. We need to start seeing these shades of grey and more of the 16 kinds of snow here if we’re really going to diagnose solutions.
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A Walkaway
Sep. 20th, 2011 at 6:42 pm
Very true. Reducing the disparity will make things better.
One of the things I learned in my studies is that in poorer (“Third World”) countries, poor people have more freedom than in the US. In this country, a person often cannot take a day off without risking their financial well-being (even for some of the middle class). The poor in, for instance, Mexico have more “agency” (control over their lives) than the poor in this country.
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David
Sep. 20th, 2011 at 1:34 am
The problem in the USA is that the rich have the best politicians money can buy making policies and laws to help them get richer. What used to be the form of democracy known as a republic has become a Oligarchy, where the lobbyists are the middle men for the rich who tell Congress what laws they want passed. The lobbyists, on behalf of their wealthy employers, negotiate the terms of the deal, whether that be cash, future employment for themselves or relatives or donations to the politicians political war chest.
Until “we the people” organize and kick these bums out of office, they will continue their raping and pillaging of our society, all in the name of “doing business”. But there is a difference between fair business practice and the kind of greed that fully wishes and intends to return the country to the “good times” of the early days of the industrial age, when businessmen had the right to pollute, and where the “clear cutting” of our economy was common practice.
The business community has all but destroyed the Union as a means of bargaining for their rights and we have all seen how government supports the rights of individuals to bargain collectively. They ban it in the government when they can and then hire their cronies in to government positions at puffed-up salaries.
One of the first things I’d like to see Congress do is to make paid lobbyists illegal. In addition, it should be illegal for Congressmen to become lobbyists within anthing less than 12 years of holding public office and vice versa: no lobbyist can run for office within 12 years of being a lobbyist. We can’t make the lobbying of Congress illegal, but we sure can take the profit out of it if we have the will.
Until we are willing to accept the fact that a handful of people are running this country the way they want to, simply because they have more money and are willing to spend a portion of their money however they have to in order to insure the growth of their wealth and power, we will continue down this road to slavery.
Only when realize that we must take responsibility for our lives and take back control of what these usurpers of freedom have stolen, our government. Yes, I know they have bought it with their money, but governments aren’t things to be bought and doing so constitutes theft.
I do NOT propose violence of any kind. We do not need to use violence. We outnumber those who rule for their own interests alone 1000 to 1. We have not yet reached a point where we cannot vote the politicians out of office, and if we cannot reform an honest government dedicated to the welfare of the people as a whole instead of just the few, then we deserve the fascist state that we will someday soon become and from that day, revolution will indeed be the only way change can be brought about.
I do not believe in violence of any kind, however, so I urge you all to change this world now before it becomes an inevitability for our children and our children’s children.
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