AMERICA'S STATE OF HEALTH DISPARITY AS THE RICH GET MUCH, MUCH RICHER AND ILLEGALS GET "FREE" HEALTHCARE

THE STATE OF HEALTH DISPARITIES: 

In recent years, many of the leading narratives about health and mortality have centered on reports of falling life expectancies among middle-aged whites. Yet the stark reality is that blacks still die at a younger age than whites, have disproportionately worse health outcomes, and are less likely to have access to care.

Those realities are shaped by what are referred to in public health as the “social determinants of health,” meaning aspects of life that affect overall wellness, from access to jobs and education to housing and transportation. In other words, where and how people live helps determine how healthy and how long their lives will be.

Factors such as racism and economic burdens can lead to “toxic stress,” according to the advocacy group Mental Health America, contributing to chronic diseases, substance abuse, and depression.

There have been a few areas of improvement, but the differences in health outcomes are still pronounced when comparing black Americans with white Americans. On Martin Luther King Day, here is a brief picture of health disparities in America, using the most recently available data for each category:

* The rates of uninsured are still higher among Latinos and blacks than they are among whites, even though rates of uninsured fell across all races following Obamacare.

* Blacks are 60% more likely than whites to have been diagnosed with diabetes by a physician. And blacks are at least 2.6 times more likely to have end stage renal disease due to diabetes than whites.

* Black women are three times more likely to die during childbirth than white women. They’re also less likely to receive prenatal care, and their infants are 2.3 times more likely to die than those of whites.

*African Americans have the highest mortality rate from cancer than any racial and ethnic group.

* Black children are four times more likely to be admitted to the hospital for asthma than white children.

*Black women are almost 18 times more likely to die from HIV/AIDS than white women, and black men are six times more likely than white men to die of HIV/AIDS.

U.S. Congressman Says Many of His Colleagues Are 'Struggling' Financially

By Mark Jennings | June 12, 2019 | 5:14 PM EDT

Rep. Jared Huffman (U.S. government photo)

 (CNSNews.com) -- Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) told CNSNews.com on Wednesday that many of his colleagues in the House of Representatives are "struggling" financially. He made the observation in response to a question about whether members of Congress, who now earn $174,000 per year, deserve a pay raise.

“I’ll let the body and the public opinion and other factors decide whether we get a cost of living increase," he said, "but I do know a lot of my colleagues are struggling.”

CNSNews.com asked Huffman: “Congressman Huffman, at $174,000 members of Congress get paid a salary that is 370 percent of the median earnings of a full-time American worker. Do you think the Congress deserves a raise?”

Huffman responded: “I think no one goes into this line of work to get rich. A lot of my colleagues are struggling with the fact that we have housing costs both in home, at our home district, in some cases where real estate values are very high and housing costs are high. And then you have to also have housing here in D.C. So, I know a lot of members are struggling."

“I’ll let the body and the public opinion and other factors decide whether we get a cost of living increase," he said, "but I do know a lot of my colleagues are struggling.”

According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), regular senators, representatives, delegates, and the resident commissioner from Puerto Rico are paid an annual salary of $174,000. 

"The only exceptions include the Speaker of the House (salary of $223,500) and the President pro tempore of the Senate and the majority and minority leaders in the House and Senate (salary of $193,400)," reported the CRS.  "These levels have remained unchanged since 2009."

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median annual earnings of a U.S. worker are $47,016. A salary of $174,000 is 3.7 times the median earnings of $47,016, or 370% higher. 

"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."  

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan  THEAMERICAN THINKER.com

STRIKES ALL OVER AMERICA, THOUSANDS OF RETAIL STORES CLOSING, CAR SALES SLUMP, REAL ESTATE IN THE DOLDRUMS… That is the real “recover”… It only happened for the rich!

Despite a booming economy, many U.S. households are still just holding on

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-federal-reserve-household-survey-20190523-story.html

By MATTHEW BOESLER

Many U.S. households find themselves in a fragile position financially, even in an economy with an unemployment rate near a 50-year low. (David Sacks / Getty Images)

Many U.S. households find themselves in a fragile position financially, even in an economy with an unemployment rate near a 50-year low, according to a Federal Reserve survey.

The Fed’s 2018 report on the economic well-being of households, published Thursday, indicated “most measures” of well-being and financial resilience “were similar to, or slightly better than, those in 2017.” The slight improvement coincided with a decline in the average unemployment rate to 3.9% last year, from 4.3% in 2017.

Despite the uptick, however, the results of the 2018 survey indicated that almost 40% of Americans would still struggle in the face of a $400 financial emergency. The statistic, which was a bit better than in the 2017 report, has become a favorite rejoinder to President Trump’s boasts about a strong economy from Democratic politicians, including 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris of California.

“Relatively small, unexpected expenses, such as a car repair or replacing a broken appliance, can be a hardship for many families without adequate savings,” the report said. “When faced with a hypothetical expense of $400, 61% of adults in 2018 say they would cover it, using cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement,” it added.

“Among the remaining 4 in 10 adults who would have more difficulty covering such an expense, the most common approaches include carrying a balance on credit cards and borrowing from friends or family,” according to the report.

Based on a survey of 11,000 people in October and November 2018, the report showed that a quarter of Americans don’t feel like they are doing "at least OK" financially. That number was higher for black and Latino Americans, at roughly one-third for both. For those making less than $40,000 a year, the share who felt they weren’t doing well was 44%.

“We continue to see the growing U.S. economy supporting most American families,” Fed Gov. Michelle Bowman said in a press release accompanying the report.

“At the same time, the survey does find differences across communities, with just over half of those living in rural areas describing their local economy as good or excellent compared to two-thirds of those living in cities,” Bowman said. “Across the country, many families continue to experience financial distress and struggle to save for retirement and unexpected expenses.”

Boesler writes for Bloomberg

"While America’s working and middle class have been subjected to compete for jobs against a constant flow of cheaper foreign workers — where more than 1.2 million mostly low-skilled immigrants are admitted to the country annually — the  billionaire class has experienced historic salary gains." Sen. Josh Hawley 

The millennial generation in the US: Life on the brink

 

For the American ruling elite, life has 

never been better.

The father of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin just completed the most expensive purchase of a living artist’s work in US history, spending over $91 million on a three-foot-tall metallic sculpture. Ken Griffin, the founder of hedge fund Citadel, recently dropped $238 million on a penthouse in New York City, the most expensive US home ever purchased. And Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has invested $42 million in a 10,000-year clock.

The stock market is booming, and President Donald Trump is boasting at every turn that the unemployment rate is lower than it has been in five decades.

However, the working class, the vast majority of the population, is confronting an unprecedented social, economic, health and psychological crisis. The same processes that have produced vast sums of wealth for the ruling elite have left millions of workers on the brink of existence.

Perhaps no segment of the population reflects the devastating consequences of these processes so starkly as the generation of young people deemed the “millennials,” those born roughly between the years 1981 and 1996. More than half the 72 million American millennials are now in their 30s, with the oldest turning 38 this year.

A recent exposé by the Wall Street Journal noted that millennials are “in worse financial shape than prior living generations and may not recover.” The article, “Millennials Near Middle Age in Crisis,” concludes by stating that people born in the 1980s are at risk of becoming “America’s Lost generation.”

The older side of this generation was born at the beginning of the Reagan years, which heralded in an era of social counter-revolution against the working class that saw the dismantling of much of the industrial infrastructure of the country, and the restructuring of economic life to benefit the banks, hedge funds and other financial firms, with the collaboration of the trade unions.

By the time these youth reached the job market, the 2008 financial crash hit, vastly accelerating all of the processes begun in the 1980s. The Obama administration organized the bailout of the banks and a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich.

The results have been devastating.

Education

More millennials have a college degree than any other generation of young adults. In 2013, 47 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds received a postsecondary degree. For most, however, getting a college education has not led to a significant increase in quality of living.

Instead, millions of young people are working jobs for which they are vastly overqualified and are shackled with unprecedented levels of debt. For the millennials who did not go to college, the situation is even worse.

·         Millennials have taken on 300 percent more student debt than their parents’ generation. [Source: The College Board, Trends in Student Aid 2013]

·         The number of hours of minimum wage work needed to pay in-state tuition and fees for each year of a four-year public college for the “Baby Boomer” generation (born between 1946 and 1964) was 510. For millennials, it is 1996. [Source: National Center for Education Statistics. Calculations based on four-year public universities from 1973–1976 and 2003–2006]

·         Since 2010, the economy has added 11.6 million jobs, and 11.5 million of them have gone to workers with at least some college education. In 2016, young workers with only a high school diploma had roughly triple the unemployment rate and three-and-a-half times the poverty rate of college grads. [Source: America’s Divided Recovery, Georgetown University]

·         Average college debt for millennials that have debt is around $33,000, with the median household income remaining the same since 1999. [Source: PEW Research and USA Today]

·         National college debt is now at $1.3 trillion, and college tuition has increased by 1,140 percent since the late 1970s. [Source: Economic Policy Institute (EPI) Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts]

·         By 2014, 48 percent of workers with bachelor’s degrees are employed in jobs for which they’re overqualified. [Source: Labor Economist Stephen Rose, published by Urban Institute.]

Graph from the Economic Policy Institute

Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell to only 61 percent.

"This is how they will destroy America from within.  The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants.  They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers.  These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT

"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now."  ----  Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com

“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes."

In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between

2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those in the United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are more than making that money back.

Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.

Watch–Josh Hawley Rips ‘Aristocratic Elite’ for Engineering U.S. Economy Against American Middle Class

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/05/16/watch-josh-hawley-rips-aristocratic-elite-for-engineering-u-s-economy-against-american-middle-class/

JOHN BINDER

 16 May 2019184

6:00

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) ripped what he called the country’s “new aristocratic elite” for engineering the United States economy against the American middle class.

For his first major speech on the Senate floor, Hawley slammed the “big banks, big tech, big multi-national corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the media,” whom he said have created an economic structure in which they, the well-connected, benefit while the American working and middle class increasingly struggle to get ahead.

Hawley said:

The chattering class often tells us that all of this—the jobs, the despair, the loss of standing—is the result of forces beyond anyone’s control. As if that’s an excuse to do nothing. But in fact, it’s not true. [Emphasis added]

Today’s society benefits those who shaped it, and it has been shaped not by working men and women, but by the new aristocratic elite. Big banks, big tech, big multi-national corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the media—these are the aristocrats of our age. They live in the United States, but they consider themselves citizens of the world. [Emphasis added]

They operate businesses or run universities here, but their primary loyalty is to their own agenda for a more unified, progressive—and profitable—global order. These modern aristocrats often claim to be a meritocracy. And many of them truly believe they are. What they don’t see, or won’t acknowledge, is that the society they have built works mainly for themselves. They’ve effectively run this country for decades. And their legacy is national division and national decline. [Emphasis added]

Defending the needs of the American middle class against a growingly powerful “aristocratic elite” is the “crisis of our time,” Hawley asserted.

“After years of sacrifice, the great American middle is being pushed aside by a new, arrogant aristocracy,” Hawley said. “The new aristocrats seek to remake society in their own image: to engineer an economy that works for the elite but few else, to fashion a culture that is dominated by their own preferences.”

“This town has embraced a politics of elite values and elite ambition rather than building opportunities to thrive in the great and broad American middle. This has left middle America—the great American middle class—under siege: battling the loss of respect and work, the decline of home and family, an epidemic of loneliness and despair,” Hawley continued. “This is the crisis of our time.”

Specifically, Hawley blasted multinational corporations for outsourcing American middle class jobs overseas — wreaking economic, cultural, and social havoc on rural and small town American communities in the process — and both political establishments for treating American citizens as mere consumers.

“In places like the one where I grew up, in middle Missouri, good-paying jobs that you can raise a family on are going away,” Hawley said. “The jobs go overseas or south of the border or to cities on the coasts. And once-vibrant towns decline, taking with them the network of schools and neighborhoods and churches that make up middle class life.”

Hawley continued:

Rural America has been particularly hard hit. Rural Americans’ life expectancy has not just leveled off, its actually dropped, and for women without a high school degree, that drop has been staggering. In some rural places, residents struggle with outright deprivation. [Emphasis added]

My home state contains some of the poorest counties in America, all in rural places that once boasted thriving small towns. As those communities struggle, want sets in. But the crisis reaches well beyond economics. [Emphasis added]

The message that Washington has sent our whole society is loud and clear: our elites are the people who matter—and those who aspire to join them. Everyone else is unimportant or backwards. And millions of Americans are left with the sense that the people who run this country view them with nothing but contempt and value them as nothing but consumers. [Emphasis added]

Indeed, working and middle class Americans have been hit the hardest from decades-long political consensus between the Republican establishment and Democrats. 

Recent research revealed that while coastal, elite metropolis cities have flourished in the last decade, small town and rural American communities have suffered depopulation, mass job loss, and continued economic strain since the Great Recession.

For instance, by 2016, elite zip codes had a surplus of 3.6 million jobs, which is more than the combined bottom 80 percent of American zip codes. While it only took about five years for wealthy cities to replace the jobs lost by the recession, it took “at risk” regions of the country a decade to recover, and “distressed” U.S. communities are “unlikely ever to recover on current trendlines,” the report predicts.

Economic growth among the country’s middle-class counties and middle-class zip codes has considerably trailed national economic growth. For example, between 2012 and 2016, there were 4.4 percent more business establishments in the country as a whole. That growth was less than two percent in the median zip code and there was close to no growth in the median county.

While America’s working and middle class have been subjected to compete for jobs against a constant flow of cheaper foreign workers — where more than 1.2 million mostly low-skilled immigrants are admitted to the country annually — the billionaire class has experienced historic salary gains.

A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that the country’s top 0.01 percent have enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent of wage earners. Between 1979 and 2017, working and middle class Americans’ wages grew by only 22 percent. On the other hand, the plutocrat class saw their salaries grow by more than 155 percent over the same period.

Likewise, free trade deals like NAFTA — supported by Republicans and Democrats — as well as China’s entering the World Trade Organization (WTO) has eliminated nearly five million American manufacturing jobs across the country, devastating steel towns and U.S. autoworkers. One former steel town in West Virginia lost 94 percent of its steel jobs because of NAFTA, with nearly 10,000 workers in the town being displaced from the steel industry.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

Billionaire Class Enjoys 15X the Wage Growth of American Working Class

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/12/23/billionaire-class-enjoys-15x-the-wage-growth-of-american-working-class/

3:00

The billionaire class — the country’s top 0.01 percent of earners — have enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as America’s working and middle class since 1979, new wage data reveals.

Between 1979 and 2017, the wages of the bottom 90 percent — the country’s working and lower middle class — have grown by only about 22 percent, Economic Policy Institute (EPI) researchers find.

Compare that small wage increase over nearly four decades to the booming wage growth of America’s top one percent, who have seen their wages grow more than 155 percent during the same period.

Breitbart TV

More Winning: Trump’s Economy Sees Highest Wage Growth in Nearly a Decade CLOSE | X

The top 0.01 percent — the country’s billionaire class — saw their wages grow by more than 343 percent in the last four decades, more than 15 times the wage growth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans.

In 1979, America’s working class was earning on average about $29,600 a year. Fast forward to 2017, and the same bottom 90 percent of Americans are earning only about $6,600 more annually.

The almost four decades of wage stagnation among the country’s working and middle class comes as the national immigration policy has allowed for the admission of more than 1.5 million mostly low-skilled immigrants every year.

(Public Citizen)

In the last decade, alone, the U.S. admitted ten million legal immigrants, forcing American workers to compete against a growing population of low-wage workers. Meanwhile, employers are able to reduce wages and drive up their profit margins thanks to the annual low-skilled immigration scheme.

The Washington, DC-imposed mass immigration policy is a boon to corporate executives, Wall Street, big business, and multinational conglomerates as every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an occupation’s labor force reduces Americans’ hourly wages by 0.4 percent. Every one percent increase in the immigrant workforce reduces Americans’ overall wages by 0.8 percent.

Mass immigration has come at the expense of America’s working and middle class, which has suffered from poor job growth, stagnant wages, and increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals.

Four million young Americans enter the workforce every year, but their job opportunities are further diminished as the U.S. imports roughly two new foreign workers for every four American workers who enter the workforce. Even though researchers say 30 percent of the workforce could lose their jobs due to automation by 2030, the U.S. has not stopped importing more than a million foreign nationals every year.

For blue-collar American workers, mass immigration has not only kept wages down but in many cases decreased wages, as Breitbart News reported. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues importing more foreign nationals with whom working-class Americans are forced to compete. In 2016, the U.S. brought in about 1.8 million mostly low-skilled immigrants.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.