America's red state crisis

[applegrove]

America's red state crisis

By Patrik Jonsson at Yahoo

http://news.yahoo.com/americas-red-state-crisis-231355002.html

"SNIP..............


The study released this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the surprising rise in middle-age, white mortality in America from 1999 to 2013 was driven by a rise in suicide, drug abuse, and alcoholism. The trends were strongest among those with the least education and in the predominantly red South and West, with the authors suggesting a vicious cycle of physical pain and addiction to painkillers, compounded by fiscal uncertainty.

“[M]any of the baby-boom generation are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were their parents,” the authors write.

Meanwhile, data show that the primary red axis of the country, running from Appalachia to the Southern coastal plains, is the epicenter of some of the nation’s greatest stresses. It’s here that the lack of well-paying jobs and large-scale abandonment of the job market are most pronounced, where obesity and health problems are most dire, where Walmart is winning a race to the bottom of what the American consumer can afford amid stagnating wages, and where the rising dependence on disability and Medicare is most pronounced.

We know that problems of poverty and health are more endemic … in the red parts of the country,” says Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale University. “That suggests that there’s probably lots of Republicans who live in areas where more effective government action could help them.”


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[applegrove]

1. I know that I drank and gained weight when faced with being boxed in to vote only Republican

and filled with loss and anxiety. I became an emotional eater. Thankfully I quit drinking. And now am on a diet that works. But hell yeah the GOP has some explaining to do. Of course they'll scapegoat government and culture of dependency. And a few more people will see through it.

[hifiguy]

2. And you can bet your ass

that they will continue voting for more of the idiots that brought them to this. Guaran-damn-teed.

President Johnson?