My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

In Trump-speak, the U.S. economy is killing off a lot of “losers.”

As a study by two Nobel-prize winning Princeton economists recently revealed, middle-aged white Americans with a high school education or less have been dying at a substantially higher rate than anybody expected over the last 15 years. Using mortality and illness data from 1999 to 2013, Angus Deaton and Anne Case found that the 45-to-54-year-old age group stood out as experiencing a 22 percent increase in their death rate.* This is a stunning outlier, as other age groups experienced decreasing mortality.

While depressing, maybe this shouldn’t have been a huge surprise given the economic hardships people in that group went through during that time. Less educated, middle-age workers were some of the worst hit. Besides the ongoing economic shift from higher-paid manufacturing jobs to lower-paid service jobs, many people — especially men — lost their jobs during the Great Recession and were unable to find new ones.

In addition to loss of income, people experienced declines in home values and blows to retirement accounts (if they had retirement savings to begin with, which is another matter). This happened during the peak of their working years — the time when they should have been making their best earnings — and when they were likely to be supporting others in their households.

Using mortality data, Deaton and Case found that alcohol and drug poisoning was the biggest cause of greater early death. Suicide and fatal chronic liver diseases also increased. This corresponds with health data that white middle-age people reported greater experience of pain and distress than other groups.

Why were white middle-age people affected most? Black Americans in the same age group, though not experiencing the same jump in mortality, already have a much higher death rate — 581 per 100,000, compared with 415 for whites. (Further evidence of the need for a more cohesive Black Lives Matter movement.) Middle-age Hispanic people track closer to European populations, and their mortality rate continued falling to 262 per 100,000.

Perhaps it is partly because white middle-age Americans grew up during the post-war industrial era with every expectation that if they worked hard, they would live the American Dream. For a lot of them, the economy failed to deliver after their young adult years. Hundreds of thousands of family-supporting manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Union strength declined.

If they couldn’t find a good job after the economic collapse in 2008, middle-age white workers may have felt obsolete. The thinner safety net in the U.S. compared to Europe proved too weak to help some people adapt and regain hope.

It seems strange at first glance that these same people are buttressing the candidacy of Donald Trump, who doesn’t hesitate to call people who don’t get ahead “losers.” His strategy, though, is to channel people’s economic despair into anger toward less powerful groups such as immigrants.

While his stage show may lose its appeal before it carries him through the GOP primaries, he’s following a time-tested formula of divide and conquer aimed at the working class, which is how we got disastrous trickle-down economic policies in the first place.

White workers used to buy into this scheme as long as the economy trickled down to them a little more than to minorities. But considering that wealth inequality is breaking records and that over 90 percent of income gains during the recovery have gone to the top 1 percent, it’s time to rethink the low taxes bargain for top incomes before our center is hollowed out any further.

Taxes are a force for good when used on investments like public infrastructure and education, which are building blocks of the middle class. As much as we’re programmed to associate taxes with moderate to severe unpleasantness, for most of us they make life more livable.

We aren’t stuck with an economy that drives people to an early grave. We can have one that helps people who hit hard times get back on their feet. It’s a political choice. Choose Democrats.

*Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, points out that Deaton and Case’s analysis doesn’t take into account the age structure of the Baby Boom generation, which is the main group captured during their study’s time frame. When adjusted for age, the death rate for white 45-to-54-year-olds flattens out somewhat.

Gelman concludes that it’s still an important finding that “death rates among middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. slightly increased even while corresponding death rates in other countries declined by about 30 percent.”

Deaton and Case acknowledge Gelman’s point but counter that the main cause of increased death, alcohol and drug poisoning, isn’t a function of age.

 

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.