A very interesting article by Ben Domenech, publisher of The
Federalist.
* * *
* *
The American working class is losing the things that make
life worth living, replaced by dependency and hopelessness.
The disturbing evidence about the health of white
middle-aged American working class...
* NOT SURE HOW WE GOT FROM "AMERICAN WORKING
CLASS" TO "WHITE MIDDLE-AGED AMERICAN WORKING CLASS," BUT I'M
NOT THE AUTHOR; I'M ONLY SHARING AND COMMENTING.
...discovered and publicized this week by Nobel prize
winner Angus Deaton and his wife Anne Case, is not tied to just one trend in
the culture, policies, or economic factors at work within the United States. It
is not the fault of one party or movement, but has multiple root causes. But it
is something we all ought to be concerned about, both for the future fiscal and
policy burden it represents, and for the broader lesson it tells us about how
America is changing.
The numbers clearly indicate that these Americans are
increasingly likely to kill themselves – whether on purpose or through the slow
gradual death of addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs. The rate of
mortality increased most dramatically for white Americans lacking any more than
a high school education.
* AH... OK... THAT'S WHY "WHITE AMERICANS."
Deaton and Case connect the problem to several factors,
including the obvious levels of stress and financial concerns within this
population. But they also draw in the prospect that America’s dramatic increase
in the portion of the working age population considered disabled has had a
negative effect for the life prospects of these Americans.
There have been a host of reports about the rise in the
number of Americans receiving disability payments over the past three decades.
It is impossible to understand the current Labor Force Participation situation
without acknowledging this dramatic growth.
“Here’s a look at people from their mid-20s to mid-50s,
and the reasons they gave for not being in the labor force in 1999 and 2014.
The biggest shift has been the share of Americans who don’t work because
they’re disabled or ill — this has risen among every age group, in some cases
pretty sharply."
"In 1999, 8% of those in their early 50s cited
disability. In 2014, it was 11%. This gets relatively little attention among
economists, despite accounting for the biggest shift.”
As Deaton and Case write:
“Our findings may also help us understand recent large
increases in Americans on disability. The growth in Social Security Disability
Insurance in this age group is not quite the near-doubling shown in Table 2 for
the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) measure of work
limitation, but the scale is similar in levels and trends."
"This has been interpreted as a response to the
generosity of payments, but careful work based on Social Security records shows
that most of the increase can be attributed to compositional effects, with the
remainder falling in the category of (hard to ascertain) increases in
musculoskeletal and mental health disabilities; our morbidity results suggest
that disability from these causes has indeed increased. Increased morbidity may
also explain some of the recent otherwise puzzling decrease in labor force
participation in the United States, particularly among women.”
* IN ENGLISH: IT'S NOT JUST PEOPLE FAKING A DISABILITY.
(*SHRUG*)
* FRANKLY... I'D HAVE TO READ THE PAPER. (BUT UNTIL I DO
I'LL KEEP AN OPEN MIND.)
In part, the reason for the ability of Americans to
access SSDI as a kind of unemployment benefit fallback is due to a Reagan-era
policy shift – via the unanimously passed 1984 Social Security Disability
Benefits Reform Act. This measure, which loosened criteria for eligibility, led
to dramatic increases in those “hard to ascertain” diagnoses of chronic pain
and mental illness as an avenue to benefit access.
* HEY... REAGAN WASN'T PERFECT AND WE NEED TO ACKNOWLEDGE
THIS.
These decisions didn’t happen in a vacuum – they came
after prior tightening of the rolls. But their impact was significant.
As Avik Roy notes:
“The SSDBRA instructed the government to place greater
weight on applicants’ own assessments of their disability, especially when it
came to pain and discomfort; to replace the government’s medical assessments
with those of the applicants’ own doctors; and to loosen the screening criteria
for mental illness, among other things. The overall effect was to create a
giant loophole, by which an applicant’s subjective claim that he was in pain,
or mentally incapacitated, would be enough to claim disability.”
(*PURSED LIPS*)
Roy notes that “While Americans may be gaining weight, they
suffer from fewer disabling conditions than they did 40 years ago, thanks to
advances in medical technology.” He cites this paper published by the Center
for American Progress and the Brookings Institution, which illustrates
traditional and clearly diagnosed causes of disability have stayed at expected
levels, but not so for musculoskeletal and mental disorders:
“Diagnoses that lend themselves to subjective
manipulation, like back pain and mental illness, have grown substantially. And
it’s not just medical diagnoses that are driving growth in disability payments.
Being a high school dropout now increases one’s likelihood of gaining
disability benefits, because high school dropouts are considered to have a
lower likelihood to rejoin the workforce.”
* THIS IS THE KIND OF $HIT THAT IS DESTROYING THE
COUNTRY! WORK OR STARVE YOU BA$TARDS!
As the New York Times reported:
“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."
* "REPORTED." "SAID." GIVE ME A
FRIGGIN' BREAK!
"Those with the least education reported the most
pain and the worst general health. The least educated also had the most
financial distress, Dr. Meara and Dr. Skinner noted in their commentary. In the
period examined by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case, the inflation-adjusted income for
households headed by a high school graduate fell by 19%.”
As a policy matter, this evidence raises concerns not
just about the trajectory of these middle-aged Americans at the moment, but
also longer term concerns about the downside of these trendlines – including
the possibility that they will enter the old age benefit portion of Medicare in
much worse health than prior generations.
(*SIGH*)
We are already seeing this problem within those states
that have joined ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion, where the costs of providing
coverage to a group of mostly childless middle-aged adults turns out to be a
group that is in much worse health than expected due to alcohol, drug use, and
irresponsible health choices. The reforms in the latest budget deal to SSDI
increases medical review requirements and goes after fraud in the system, but
it remains to be seen how much impact that will have on the fiscal side.
As a cultural matter, the picture is even worse. The
surrender to the permanent trap of disability payments is a consequence of a
loss of a certain American working class stoicism, which grappled with the
tragic nature of life with what was essentially a 19th-century mentality. It
was hard enough to deal with such a vision before the disintegration of working
class marriage in the country – notice the contrast drawn by Charles Murray
between the attitudes toward marriage and the experience of divorce in the
white working class versus professionals.
Imagine entering your fifties and looking back on your
life and seeing substance abuse, disintegrated families, distance from kids,
limited neighborhoods where connections have frayed, and the humility of
economic dependence as far as the eye can see, and you start to understand how
the slow and the quick roads to destruction seem more tempting than dealing
with the pain of life.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
That lack of hope is exacerbated by the absence of belief
in a higher purpose or involvement in a community of religious believers.
Generation X has not increased its portion of the religiously unaffiliated as
dramatically as Millennials, but it is still significantly less tied to the
church than Baby Boomers:
“The number of religiously unaffiliated adults has
increased by roughly 19 million since 2007. There are now approximately 56
million religiously unaffiliated adults in the U.S., and this group – sometimes
called religious 'nones' – is more numerous than either Catholics or mainline
Protestants, according to the new survey. Indeed, the unaffiliated are now
second in size only to evangelical Protestants among major religious groups in
the U.S.”
Pew released new numbers on this just the other day, and
there is no sign of a shift in the trends here.
(*SIGH*)
A number of pieces have, over the course of this election
cycle, delved into the question of America’s “lost” greatness, and what would
lead voters to find Donald Trump’s message so appealing. It is not that hard to
understand in this context.
You are one of the millions of middle-aged unemployed
white American with a high school degree. Having moved from unemployment
benefits to disability, you receive sufficient benefits to subsist – around
1,200 dollars a month on average – and to pay for the alcohol and drugs that
help you self-medicate, in addition to what your doctor has prescribed. Your
life is essentially one marked by hopelessness. You are statistically unlikely
to ever re-enter the workforce.
* FOLKS... WE NEED TO GIVE A DAMN! IF NOT OUT OF
COMPASSION - THAN OUT OF SELF-INTEREST!
For all too many Americans in this segment of the
population, the things that make life not only endurable but happy are faith,
now lost to us; family, which is fractured; community, which is disintegrated;
and work, which most find hard to come by.
(*BITING MY LOWER LIP*)
The TV screen flickers with images of people living lives
you could never hope to emulate. Your situation is bleak, and while our Soma is
better, it is still not a replacement for the pursuit of happiness. And then a
man who represents a version of what you might hope your life could be like
comes on TV – a man who comes from the world of the elites but is strong enough
to reject them and their lies – and he tells you with confidence he will make
things great again.
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