http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/29/1381134/-NYTimes-Conservative-Economics-and-Income-Inequality-Are-Literally-Killing-Us?detail=email
Thirty-five years ago, babies born in the U.S. had an infant mortality rate equal to Germany. Today, American babies die at twice the rate of those in Germany.
Thirty-five years ago, the U.S. ranked 13th in life expectancy for girls among the 34 recognized industrial societies. Today we are ranked 29th out of those same 34 countries.
We have the highest teenage birth rate among the industrialized world.
One out of every four children in this country lives with a single parent, the highest rate by far in the industrialized world.
Our incarceration rate is triple what it was four decades ago, with an incarceration rate five times that of other wealthy democracies.
Economists from the University of Chicago, MIT and the University of Southern California conducted research to find out why our children die at a rate exponentially higher than European kids. Their conclusion? Staggering rates of income disparity, all stemming directly from the 1980's, the Era of Ronald Reagan and the beginning of the resurgence of the conservative movement.
"On nearly all indicators of mortality, survival and life expectancy, the United States ranks at or near the bottom among high-income countries,” says a report on the nation’s health by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.
What’s most shocking about these statistics is not how unhealthy they show Americans to be, compared with citizens of countries that spend much less on health care and have much less sophisticated medical technology. What is most perplexing is how stunningly fast the United States has lost ground.
[B]laming globalization and technological progress for the stagnation of the middle class and the precipitous decline in our collective health is too easy. Jobs were lost and wages got stuck in many developed countries.
What set the United States apart — what made the damage inflicted upon American society so intense — was the nature of its response. Government support for Americans in the bottom half turned out to be too meager to hold society together.
A more compelling explanation is that when globalization struck at the jobs on which 20th-century America had built its middle class, the United States discovered that it did not, in fact, have much of a welfare state to speak of. The threadbare safety net tore under the strain.
Call it a failure of solidarity. American institutions, built from hostility toward collective solutions, couldn’t hold society together when the economic underpinning of full employment at a decent wage gave in.
"Hostility toward collective solutions" is polite terminology for "greed."
and they say the greatest country in the world, we need to be number one American exceptionalism who are they trying to convince their own perpetual state of denial or their under informed base because we ain't biting. if you want to assign blame as to why our global image is that of a flag in a wind storm continuously for 20 years torn and tattered they blame Pres. but this is a decades in the making thing not last 7 years of republican obstruction of Obama they've been at this for awhile and i don't believe advisers and analyst didn't give them a heads up but they were getting theirs and that's all that matters then and now nothing new under the republican sun.
