Suicide Is America’s latest epidemic (2)

Now we have the second and concluding part of his article for ‘The Nation’, titled: “Suicide is America’s latest epidemic”.

The large increase in suicide within the white working class began a couple of decades before Donald Trump’s election. Still, it’s reasonable to ask what he’s tried to do about it, particularly since votes from these Americans helped propel him to the White House. In 2016, he received 64 percent of the votes of whites without college degrees; Hillary Clinton, only 28 percent. Nationwide, he beat Clinton in counties where deaths of despair rose significantly between 2000 and 2015.

White workers will remain crucial to Trump’s chances of winning in 2020. Yet while he has spoken about and initiated steps aimed at reducing the high suicide rate among veterans, his speeches and tweets have ignored the national suicide epidemic or its inordinate impact on white workers. More importantly, to the extent that economic despair contributes to their high suicide rate, his policies have made matters worse.

The real benefits from the December 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act championed by Trump and congressional Republicans flowed to those on the top steps of the economic ladder. By 2027, when the Act’s provisions will run out, the wealthiest Americans are expected to have captured 81.8 percent of the gains. And that’s not counting the windfall they received from recent changes in taxes on inheritances. Trump and the GOP doubled the annual amount exempt from estate taxes—wealth bequeathed to heirs—through 2025 from $5.6 million per individual to $11.2 million (or $22.4 million per couple). Who benefits most from this act of generosity? Not workers, that’s for sure, but every household with an estate worth $22 million or more

As for job retraining provided by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, Trump proposed cutting that program by 40 percent in his 2019 budget, later settling for keeping it at 2017 levels. Future cuts seem in the cards as long as Trump is in the White House. The Congressional Budget Office projects that his tax cuts alone will produce even bigger budget deficits in the years to come. (The shortfall last year was $779 billion and it is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2020). Inevitably, Trump and congress Republicans will then demand additional reductions for social programs.

This is all the more likely because Trump and those Republicans also slashed corporate taxes from 35 percent to 21 percent—an estimated $1.4 trillion in savings for corporations over the next decade. And unlike the income tax cut, the corporate tax has no end date. Trump assured his base that the big bucks those companies had stashed abroad would start flowing home and produce a wave of job creation—all without adding to the deficit. As it happens, however, most of that repatriated cash has been used for corporate stock buy-backs, which totaled more than $800 billion last year. That, in turn, boosted share prices, but didn’t exactly rain money down on workers. No surprise, since the wealthiest 10 percent in the US own at least 84 percent of all stocks and the bottom 60 percent have less than 2 percent of them.

Trump’s corporate tax cut hasn’t produced the tsunami of job-generating investments he predicted either. Indeed, in its aftermath, more than 80 percent of US companies stated that their plans for investment and hiring hadn’t changed. As a result, the monthly increase in jobs has proven unremarkable compared to Barak Obama’s second term, when the economic recovery that Trump largely inherited began. Yes, the economy did grow 2.3percent in 2017 and 2.9 percent in 2018 (though not 3.1 percent as Trump claimed). There wasn’t, however, any “unprecedented economic boom—a boom that has rarely been seen before” as he insisted in this year’s State of the Union Address.

Anyway, what matters for workers struggling to get by is growth in real wages, and there’s nothing to celebrate on that front: Between 2017 and mid-2018 they actually declined by 1.63 percent for white workers and 2.5 percent for African Americans, while they rose for Hispanics by a measly 0.37 percent. And though Trump insists that his beloved tariff hikes are going to help workers, they will actually raise the prices of goods, hurting the working class and other low-income Americans the most.

Then there are the obstacles those susceptible to suicide face in receiving insurance-provided mental-health care. If you’re a white worker without medical coverage or have a policy with a deductible and co-payments that are high and your income, while low, is too high to qualify for Medicaid, Trump and the GOP haven’t done anything for you. Never mind the president’s tweet proclaiming that “the Republican Party Will Become ‘The Party of Healthcare!’”

Let me amend that: Actually, they have done something. It’s just not what you’d call helpful. The percentage of uninsured adults, which fell from 18 percent in 2013 to 10.9 percent at the end of 2016, thanks in no small measure to Obamacare, had risen to 13.7 percent by the end of last year.

On a problem that literally has life-and-death significance for a pivotal portion of his base, Trump has been AWOL. In fact, to the extent that economic strain contributes to the alarming suicide rate among white workers, his policies are only likely to exacerbate what is already a national crisis of epidemic proportions.

AS/ME