Losing years

~ susie

Of course, the rationale for raising the Social Security retirement age is that “people” are living longer. The people who are living longer are upper-income white males:

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.


Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

Published by susie

4 thoughts on “Losing years”

  1. I’ve always read the life expectancy rate has improved mostly due to an improvement in infant mortality rates. When a person achieves age 65, though, his or her life expectancy rate has not improved significantly.

  2. This rationale is a red herring! Susie is the living proof that you can’t assume employability into the sixties. The jobless rate for this demographic is through the roof. Hiring prospects are near to non-existent. The fiction that they can work longer is a sentence to panhandle for two years (or blog except that the pay is less reliable). What this amounts to is a two year asset deplete that will reduce living standards dramatically for the remainder of retirement. Patrician bullshit on stilts. May Daniel Patrick Moynihan rot in hell.

  4. Yup, raising the SS age, and especially raising the Medicare age, is just another argument for the lower economic quintiles to just “Hurry Up and DIE.”

    What’s sickening is that Dems are making this argument. I’m lookin’ at you, Obama, and all your NeoLib Corporatist ilk.

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