Thema:
Die Arbeiterklasse stirbt an Verzweiflung flat
Autor: Rand al'Thor
Datum:18.01.20 00:05
Antwort auf:US-Politik, Part VII: Are you white enough? von Froschi

"We Americans are locked in political combat and focused on President Trump, but there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him. Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.

We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”

“The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told us. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.” Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.

...

The stock market is near record highs, but working-class Americans (often defined as those without college degrees) continue to struggle. If you’re only a high school graduate, or worse, a dropout, work no longer pays. If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25."

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/sunday/deaths-despair-poverty.html]

Es wird Jahrzehnte dauern das nachhaltig umzukehren, daher hoffe ich, dass sich die progressiven Demokraten gegen den Widerstand vieler Medien durchsetzen können. Joe Biden ist sicher nicht die Lösung für die gravierenden Probleme der USA. Einem Sanders/Yang Ticket traue ich da schon mehr zu.

Die Weltwirtschaftskrise der frühen 30er-Jahre führte ja damals auch zu einer grundlegenden Neuausrichtung der amerikanischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik durch Roosevelt und Truman.


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