GOP Plans to Drag US Back to 19th C, Lives Shortened, Cut Soc Sec, Medicare; Losses Since 1981

- How the GOP plans to drag America back to the 19th century, by Thom Hartmann, Alternet, March 22, 2024. Ed.

“Moscow Mike” Johnson and his Republicans in the House are determined to continue to shorten the lifespans of Americans by forcing brutal Red State policies on the entire nation. It’s literally killing people, but they frankly don’t care so long as they can keep taxes on their billionaire owners low. And now Republicans are officially saying they want to cut Social Security and gut Medicare.

Ronald Reagan is long gone, but a recent report shows how his policies and his party live on and are still hurting us: they’re responsible for millions of lost years of Americans’ lives. The study calls them “missing Americans.” It wasn’t always this way. In the 1930s, after FDR rolled out programs to aid the homeless and unemployed across the country, America enjoyed a longer life expectancy — and more healthy years within that life expectancy — than any other wealthy nation in the world.

While some of that was due to the public health crisis echoing across Europe in the wake of World War I, it was largely because FDR’s Democrats in charge of the country were building schools and hospitals like there was no tomorrow. Republican President Eisenhower followed in that tradition through the 1950s, and in the 1960s LBJ rolled out Medicare and Medicaid. As a result, we continued to have the world’s best lifespans and quality-of-life.

Then came Reagan’s austerity and neoliberalism campaigns in 1981 and America began to become unraveled.

That study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, looked at “excess deaths” (“missing Americans”) in our country versus others around the world. The researchers from Boston Univ., the Univ. of Pennsylvania, and the Harvard Medical School found: “The US had lower mortality rates than peer countries in the 1930s–1950s and similar mortality in the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, however, the US began experiencing a steady increase in the number of missing Americans, reaching 622,534 in 2019 alone.” Those excess deaths are almost all entirely the result of Republican policies, both at the federal and state level...
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/2024-gop/

Missing Americans: Early death in the United States—1933–2021, PNAS Nexus, Vol. 2, Issue 6, June 2023, pgad173, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad173

..Wiki. The term NEOLIBERALISM has become more prevalent in recent decades to describe the transformation of society due to market-based reforms. A prominent factor in the rise of conservative and right-libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them, neoliberalism is often assoc. with policies of economic liberalization, incl. privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy & society...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

Wiki. The TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FACTORY FIRE in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on Sat., March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers – 123 women and girls and 23 men – who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, falling, or jumping to their deaths..

The factory normally employed about 500 workers, mostly young Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls, who worked 9 hours a day on weekdays, plus 7 hours on Saturdays. They earned for their 52 hours of work, between $7 and $12 a week, (equiv. of $191 to $327 a week in 2018 currency, or $3.67 to $6.29 per hour.)...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire