Study says White Trump Voters are in mortal danger of dying drunk, buck-naked in what is left of a Santa outfit.
But several million Americans – black, white, and Hispanic – now live in households with per capita income of less than $2 a day, essentially the same standard that the World Bank uses to define destitution-level poverty in India or Africa. Finding shelter in the United States on that income is so difficult that $2-a-day poverty is almost certainly much worse in the US than $2-a-day poverty in India or Africa. Sir Angus Deaton, Nobel Lauerate and Princeton Economics Scholar
So, the impoverished Americans in Back of the Yards, Austin and Englewood of Chicago, Blue Island, Hopkins Park, Harrisburg, Danville, Murpheesboro, Mound City and Camden, Illinois just might be well-served by packing up to sub-Saharan desert nations, or Zimbabwe for a chance at happiness? $2.00 a day in Addis Abbaba must go way further than it does in Phoenix, Illinois.
The study employed by Bruce Dold's Chicago Tribune was conducted by Sir Angus Deaton, et al. and the ever-compliant Bruce is taking this opportunity ( post ObamaCare earthquake) to herd the white cats who voted for President Trump in the 'feel my pain' tent of 2016 Losers.
Nice idea.
The media has all but closed the curtains on Make America Great with no end of help from the tasseled loafer crowd of the GOP, the bug-eyed leaders of the angry opposition (Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi) and President Twitter-Jonesing, his own bad self.
Me. I'll wait and see how the movie turns out.
Bruce Dold's Chicago Tribune and the equally daffy DNC clown posse at the Sun Times will toll the death knell of Trump for the next four years, in same manner that Wally's Last Stop was closing this week from 1990-1998. They will be correct . . .years from now.
This is the same Nobel Laureate whose 2015 study that Millions of Americans live on $2 a day. Debunked. Now, it is white American working class, no-college yokels are pulling the Dutch Act.
In these mean times, Chicagoans are being treated with this:
Since 1999, white men and women ages 45 through 54 have endured a sharp increase in "deaths of despair," Case and Deaton found in their earlier work. These include suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths such as liver failure.
In the paper released Thursday, Case and Deaton draw a clearer relationship between rising death rates and changes in the job market since the 1970s. They find that men without college degrees are less likely to receive rising incomes over time, a trend "consistent with men moving to lower and lower skilled jobs."
And Trump was elected in November, 2016. Now, here is the payoff -
Those dynamics helped fuel the rise of President Donald Trump, who won widespread support among whites with only a high school diploma. Yet Deaton said his policies are unlikely to reverse these trends, particularly the health care legislation now before the House that Trump is championing. That bill would lead to higher premiums for older Americans, the Congressional Budget Office has found.
"The policies that you see, seem almost perfectly designed to hurt the very people who voted for him," Deaton said.Since, January 20th Trump has destroyed the American economy, confiscated Obama phones, hurt Hollywood's feelings a whole lot, cost Colin Kaepernick his NFL career, made Oprah want to President, put lead in Dick Durbins Perrier and given the keys to the White House to the national membershipof Outlaws, MC.
America is stuffed in a hand basket roaring to hell!
I'm having Italian chicken and potatoes with garlic, lemon and red peppers, later this evening. That is one prediction that shall come to pass. Mmmm -mm.
From 1999 to 2015, Deaton's studies tell us, white working poor as well as black and Hispanic improverished have had a hell of a time.
Yet, it was the Clinton, Bush and Obama years that gutted the working poor of America with policies and real estate and banking gambles, not to mention the give-away government goodies that have overflowed the banks of the Washington swamp. Here is what Forbes had to say, THERE ARE ZERO AMERICANS LIVING ON $2 PER DAY:
So what they're really measuring is the cash incomes of the poorest people without accounting for pretty much all the things that are done to increase the total incomes (such total income being equal to consumption possibilities of course) of those poor people. The only part of welfare that they do include is cash welfare under TANF.
And that's where their large rise in this form of poverty comes from. They are, as above, measuring only the cash income of poor people, including cash from welfare. But this system was deliberately changed in the 1990s to reduce the amount of cash welfare people got and increase the amount of in kind welfare (ie, Section 8, EITC, SNAP and so on) that people got. So, what they're actually recording, in their increase, is what Congress voted for. Stop giving people cash and give them more in other ways instead. I don't think the original change was a good idea myself but it's still something of a statistical trick they're pulling off here, not a real change in what people can consume.
Finally, they're deliberately blurring how this sort of poverty persists or does not. When we look at those World Bank numbers for other countries then we're looking at people who live that way all the time. In this research done about the US we're not looking at that at all. Rather, at people who have, for some however short period of time, had very little cash income. Just as an example (and I emphasize, this is only an example, just to illustrate the logic here) imagine a family with one person in work earning $100,000 a year. Then they get fired. It takes them 2 months to find another job paying $100,000 a year (say, a decent software engineer in a company that goes bust). They do not file for any welfare while unemployed (perhaps because they have savings, that sort of thing). Under the method used to calculate those 1.5 million people living on less than $2 a day our thoroughly upper middle class software engineer qualifies. Because there was a period of one or two months where cash household income was under $2 a day per family member.
Do I think the US welfare system is perfect? Nope, most certainly not. It's also true that the US is more unequal than other advanced countries. But the real incidence of $2 a day poverty in the US is zero. The numbers cooked up for this book look only at cash income, not any other form of aid that people might get. They are also measuring transient populations flowing through a rocky patch, not some vast underclass. And finally they are measuring income, not the thing that we really want to measure, consumption possibilities.People commit suicide when they despair. Do people who vote despair? That would be a nice study, but it might not come with pre-cast outcomes.
The only Nobel Prize Laureate of the last ten years that I will listen to is Bob Dylan.
