Seriously, we’ve got RFK questioning vaccines, promises to roll back government overreach in areas like protections against toxic chemicals, two fresh pandemics brewing. I bet we can get there by the end of 2025!
I heard they're going it put a vaccine skeptic in charge of the FDA. You'd just need a few more moves like that, roll back whatever government funded healthcare currently exists and a few other moves to encourage more unhealthy lifestyle habits and 2030 might actually be possible.
Meanwhile in Australia, we are sitting at 4th place with universal healthcare and a half decent welfare system, although there is a housing crisis at the moment which is resulting in more homeless every year, if that keeps up we might fall below 4th place.
We can do better, it is time to return to the constitution that clearly says we are all created equal under god. And hence deserve equal treatment. The reign of the corporation must end.
The beauty is, no matter how bad it gets, the GOP has figured out how to pin ALL the blame on the Dems, liberals, Muslims, homosexuals, Mexicans, Hillary's pizza, Hunter Biden's laptop, ...
Ironically, Hispanics have higher life expectancies than white people, so the GOP can’t blame the decline on them.
But Hispanics also have the lowest access to healthcare coverage, so democrats can’t blame declining life expectancy on not spending enough money on healthcare or whatever either.
The real reason seems to be that Americans are disproportionately fat, lonely, and live apart from extended family.
Or you could just go look this up. Ranking of life expectancy asks the question of what causes contribute the most to the life expectancy shortfall between the US and the countries ahead of us on the rankings. The mix of contributions is different depending on which country (Australia looks more like us than France), but across the board the most consistent major factors are homicide, firearms, motor vehicle accidents, and drug overdoses. No matter what country you look at, those are the ones that are always distinctively different here.
Because since its founding, the main organizing principle of the US has been individual freedom and individual autonomy. It has taken that principle further than any other country since medieval Iceland.
It would be hard to persuade you in a comment, but I guess it doesn't hurt to try.
Cocaine and opium remained large social problems in the US for decades before they were finally outlawed. The consensus during those decades was that a federal law against them would be an unacceptable compromise of the liberty of the individual. (Various states had banned cocaine and opium in a timely manner, but these statewide bans did not do much to discourage use because of how easy it is for a resident of one state to get drugs from another state.) Then when they did pass a federal law against the drugs, to appease the pro-liberty faction, the law was not an outright ban, but rather a "stamp tax" where the details were such that it would be unprofitable to sell drugs and pay the tax (and the penalty for not paying included significant jail time).
The same thing happened with federal income tax: its enactment was delayed for decades out of a belief that it would be a violation of the liberty-promoting measures in the Constitution.
Might be a local peak, those in there 20s/30s today will soon be middle aged. If you're suicidal in your prime, and you don't manage to build a family, good fucking luck in your autumn years.
A strong driver of suicide (in all cultures, across time) is rejection by your community. Nowadays, it's easy for neurotic people to feel that way because they don't have a community telling them otherwise.
