Why are death rates rising for middle-aged white Americans?

Chateau Heartiste comments on today's news headline story:

Poor, middle-aged White Americans are dropping like flies. Their death rate “increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.” The primary causes of the mortality increase for this group of maligned Americans are suicide, alcohol poisoning, and drug overdoses from painkillers. Environmental shocks.

Think about the ingredients of a happy life:

Family — destroyed by welfare, feminism, gogrrl careerism, obesity, and sinking earnings for working class men.
Community — destroyed by population density and Diversity™.
Work — destroyed by open borders, automation, and oligarchic greed.
Faith — destroyed by SCALE-induced materialism and noblesse malice.

The working poor and less-educated need these four pillars, perhaps more than effete SWPLs do, to feel like their lives have purpose. Instead, malignant elements in our ruling class have done everything in their power to knock those pillars over and smash them to dust.

I’d like to suggest other reasons for the suicidal ideation of underprivileged White Americans:

– Middle-aged Whites were born during a time when America was still predominantly White and native. Over their lifetimes they have witnessed the country turned over to brown world hordes. They are the only generation to have spent their formative years enjoying Peak White America and their productive adult years suffering the insults and antagonisms of Post-White America. They therefore have a dispiriting perspective other generations lack (or, in the case of the elderly, lack the ready memories from which to draw comparisons).
– White Americans have lost the protection and loyalty of their government. When your government stops “having your back” and treats you simultaneously like a sponge to be soaked for gibsmedats and an evil blight hindering social justice, you tend to feel like a stranger in your homeland.

– Obesity is driving men to suicide and drugs. Not directly; through their fat wives. Men’s romantic desires are visually centered. It is cruel to mock men for this biological reality and to expect them to “man up” when their wives get fat and unattractive. Obesity is rampant among the lower classes and White men stuck in these larded-up marriages have to feel desperately alone with their repudiated desires.

Read more here.

Personally, I think the impact of alcoholism and other addictions (pain-killers) is significant. People with less education work the more physical jobs, often resulting in painful injuries. Addictions of all kinds are always harmful. They are based on lies: ("I can do this with no consequences to my health")

Fighting for people

How has the Obama presidency worked out for us in the 99 percent?

According to University of California, Berkeley, economist Emmanuel Saez, 95 percent of all recovery gains have accrued to the much-vilified “top 1 percent.”

At the same time, the poor have become even more desperate. The number of Americans receiving aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (known as food stamps) has increased by almost 50 percent since January 2009, from 32.2 million to 47.7 million. One in six citizens in the richest country in the world now rely on food aid from their government.

Today, a lower percentage of Americans are in the workforce—63 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—than at any time since the infamous days of Jimmy Carter.

Arthur C. Brooks suggests the need for transformation: personal moral transformation, and four pillars:

faith, family, community, and work.

His second recommendation is material giving:

As I found in my 2006 book Who Really Cares, the average conservative household contributes significantly more to charity than does the average liberal household despite earning less income. According to the 1996 General Social Survey, those who strongly agreed that “the government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” gave away $140 on average to charity. Among those who strongly disagreed, the average gift was $1,637.

Of the 10 most charitable states in 2012, as ranked by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, nine went for Romney over Obama. Three times as many red states as blue states placed in the top 20 states in giving. And all but one of the 10 least charitable states swung President Obama’s way.

But we have learned three lessons from our material giving:

First, there is nothing inherently wrong with safety-net programs, be they SNAP, housing support, or Medicaid. Second, they must be designed and administered in ways that fight fiercely against dependency. And third, the safety net’s ultimate goal cannot be the perpetual subsistence of poor Americans in barely tolerable lives. We can aim at nothing less than real human flourishing.

Brooks proposes a third plank in a "social justice agenda:" opportunity.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has shown that in 1980, 21 percent of Americans in the bottom income quintile rose to the middle quintile or higher by 1990. But those who started off in the bottom quintile in 1995 had only a 15 percent chance of becoming middle class in 2005. That is a one-third decline in mobility in under a generation. Other analyses tell a similar tale. One 2007 Pew study measured relative mobility in Canada and Scandinavia at more than twice America’s level.

How can a conservative social-justice agenda reverse these trends and expand opportunity for all? An opportunity society has two basic building blocks: Universal education to create a base of human capital and an economic system that rewards hard work, merit, innovation, and personal responsibility. So opportunity conservatism must passionately advance education reform and relentlessly defend the morality of free enterprise.

So, how are we doing in education?

Public schools in Washington D.C. spend more per pupil than all but one U.S. state (New York), yet only about 56 percent of children graduate from high school. In our nation’s capital, a city flanked by six suburban counties that rank among America’s 10 richest, only 15 percent of eighth-graders read at grade level.

But, while our education system has failed so many, our free enterprise system has

saved billions from poverty by giving them their first opportunity to rise in history. Truly, this is America’s gift to the world. Conservatives can and must champion this truth without apology or compromise. For the sake of all people, our end goal must be to make free enterprise as universally accepted and nonpartisan as civil rights are today.

So what should conservatives do?

For too long, conservatives have identified themselves as fighting against things, perpetually making war on the left’s mistaken priorities. They fight against punitive taxes, creeping overregulation, wasteful spending, licentious culture, and ruinous national debt.

The central, motivating purpose of conservative philosophy is not fighting against things. It is fighting for people.

Read more here.
Thanks to Kris Cook.